Dell is monitoring the PC-blade market and has begun offering alternatives that it believes are a better answer, says Don McCall, product marketing manager for Dell's corporate desktop business. The company has an undisclosed number of customers who are racking and stacking PCs in a back room and using Avocent stations at the desktop. It also launched a thin-PC program that customers are evaluating, he says. With thin PCs, hard drives and flash memory are removed from the terminals, which are connected to a backroom server platform.
"We don't want to force-feed a hardware solution into a customer's enterprise," McCall says. "We can step into the market if customers demand it, but, at this point, it's not clear there will be a large business for blade PCs."
IDC's Kay believes others will enter the market as volumes grow, leading to more choices, standardization, and potentially a weeding-out of existing vendors. "If you look at the gaming PC market, companies like Alienware, Voodoo PC, and Falcon Northwest were trucking along with volumes of a few thousand a month," Kay says. "When the big boys like Dell, HP, and Gateway entered the market, they cranked it up by an order of magnitude."
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