The economist has an interesting article this week on Dell’s new strategy of providing services. It’s called Commoditise This.

Dell has been clobbered recently. HP, Sun, Apple, the S&P and the DOW have all performed better over the last 2 years.

The Economist says the Dell has a wide range on new plans, including more cost cutting, and going after emerging markets. However, the economist goes on to say:

But the area with the greatest promise—and the most potential pitfalls—is Dell’s plan to put more emphasis on services. In essence, Dell hopes to commoditise technology services just as it commoditised hardware.

The initiative got a boost on November 14th when Dell took the rare step of acquiring a company: it bought ACS, a British technology-services firm with a strong presence in London’s financial district. Dell’s plan is to move up from basic things like PC support to more sophisticated services such as designing and installing big computer systems. As with other markets it has attacked from below, such as servers and storage, Dell plans to undercut the incumbents with lower prices and thinner margins.

An Idea for Dell - Outsourced Enterprise 2.0

The Economist rightly points out that Dell faces some challenges in the services game, not least of which is that they are starting to compete directly with many of their clients.

So, here is a simple idea for Dell. Why not provide a brand new service, that does not really exist today? For example, they could leverage their existing IT support and server hosting businesses to provide an out-sourced Enterprise 2.0 platform already pre-built. The list of tools should include:

1. Activity Centric internal enterprise blogs (People Pages, Project Pages, etc)
2. Wikis
3. LDAP / Access control
4. Back-up
5. A platform to support the development of Ad Hoc applications

That last one is the most seriously difficult to deliver.