Dell: Design based on mid-market needs

When creating new products, Dell looks to the mid-market as its "design point," according to an executive.

However, the company still seems unclear as to whether this area of the market will even take up the new technology or products.

Steve Schuckenbrock, president of large enterprise, said: "Our design point is to the mid-market. From [here] we think those solutions scale up pretty nicely and scale down pretty nicely too."

"We know the wrong way to do things is to build for the large enterprises and try and take that down to the little guys."

He claimed that the issues faced by medium companies were very applicable to larger companies, including storage problems, data de-duplication and managing policies.

Although the company is pushing cloud computing at their launch event in San Francisco, a fellow executive at Dell refused to say the medium business market was heading towards this technology at any speed.

Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager of server platforms, said: "I don't think we know yet. We certainly see customers across the sizes... evaluating cloud technology."

"The conventional wisdom is the small [and medium] businesses are likely to move to public cloud or SaaS environments [but] we want to be in the situation where we can offer our customers it either way"

"I don't think we are arrogant enough to know yet," he concluded, "so we want to be able to support our SMB customers anyway they want to employ."