Dell Buys SilverBack

SilverBack, also known as the company with the best damn swag at WWPC, got bought out by Dell.

Conversely, this means Dell is buying itself into the managed services space.

Interestingly, nobody seems to have raised a lot of interest of this. Even more interesting is the deafening silence that has overcome the MSP community, almost as if they don’t care.

So, whats at play here? Are we just thinking that Dell is up to its same tricks and because it has failed so many times in the past it will fail again? Does it mean that perhaps Dell is one puzzle piece (Zenith Infotech?) away from providing a full system to its partners and resellers – I mean, lets look at this for a moment: Dell now has a suite of gear for everything short of mobility. They will sell you a home laptop, desktop, a business desktop, laptop, switch, server, storage array and even the rack assembly for it. They’ll call you and spec out the sale beforehand, top it off with 3 years of support and 4 hour guaranteed part swap. They have a near army of slaves both in India and in America ($60 per incident for onforce.com onsite visit is a slave wage) and today they bought the software management tool to tie it all in.

Sounds pretty sweet, doesn’t it? I can see it, just one extra radio button during checkout:

Dell Managed Services
Let Dell proactively manage your computer and network and do all your maintenance for you! We take care of backups, antivirus updates, network diagnostics and give you the peace of mind:
$8 / month Managed Services
$18 / month Managed Services with unlimited support calls [Dell Recommended]

Price too unbelievable? Thats actually a 10% profit margin on top of Zenith Infotech, which is what a great deal of MSP shops use as a NOC solution.

So let’s review:

world famous brand
trusted name for home and business
extended guarantee
local service and outsourced IT
huge portfolio of sales and support services
sales assistance
commodity pricing
profit

Will Dell do for the MSP sector what it did for the OEM computer makers of late 90’s? We always figured time would tell, never figured it would happen so quickly. Anxious to see how they screw this one up.