Cargill Inc., an international conglomerate with 98,000 employees in 61 countries, announced Tuesday it will standardize its hardware on Dell technology.
Dell will provide Cargill with servers, desktops, notebooks and services totaling some 30,000 units. Financial terms of the 3-year deal were not disclosed.
“The fact that Cargill, a diverse global corporation, has chosen Dell as its technology partner for a vast standardization project shows the value of the Dell model,” Dell spokesperson Roe Thiessen told internetnews.com.
Dell recently scored large growth gains in the server market according to studies released last week by Gartner Group and IDG Research. Dell ended the year with an 8.6 percent market share, or 19 percent revenue growth, according to IDC. Dell’s growth outpaced IBM and HP, though it still holds only a relatively small percentage of the total server marketplace.
According to Dell’s Thiessen, the Round Rock, Texas-based company is focused on a scalable enterprise strategy of modular computing blocks that can be added as required. Thiessen referred to it as a “pay-as-you-grow” approach. IBM refers to its scalable approach as on-demand while others like HP call it utility computing.
“We build this strategy on standards-based technology as we believe this allows customers to enjoy the ever increasing performance of an Intel-based architecture and enables them to integrate new technologies easily,” Thiessen said. “Cargill’s purchase is in essence endorsing our strategy and standardization because they want more flexibility with lower cost and better performance.”
The Dell strategy seems to be working. The company recently posted its best operating period ever in the fourth quarter of 2004 with an 18 percent revenue increase and a 26 percent increase in earnings per share.
Cargill Standardizes With Dell Hardware
