Dell, HP Bring Web To Small Business

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June 27, 2000 (9:42 PM EDT)

By Mark Hachman,

NEW YORK -- Dell Computer and Hewlett-Packard each took steps this week to enhance their appeal to small businesses, providing services and support through dedicated Web portals.

Tuesday, Dell (stock: DELL), Round Rock, Texas, filled a hole in its online strategy by announcing a co-branded ISP arrangement with AT&T (stock: T) at PC Expo. The new DellEPro service will be bundled on Dell's business PCs and direct small-business customers to Dell through its website, DellEWorks.com, a single site dedicated to aggregating content and services from leading vendors.

Hewlett-Packard (stock: HWP), Palo Alto, Calif., announced a suite of tightly coupled services centered on its own small-business portal, a partnership with vJungle.com., Redmond, Wash. One novel facet of a second partnership with FusionOne will be the ability to manage stored data through a variety of information appliances, including a cellular phone.

Dell, the leader in direct U.S. PC sales, and HP, tops in the U.S. PC retail channel, outlined overtly similar small-business online strategies that diverged in a few key areas. For example, Dell and AT&T executives said they feel that promoting and bundling the dial-up access offered by AT&T will tie customers to the Web, and thus to its services. Dell's plan to partner with top-tier customers has produced, for now, a collection of diverse content that HP executives pooh-poohed.

HP, on the other hand, has tried to unify its small business portal around a centralized look and feel, as well as services that can interact with one another. HP has not settled upon a preferred ISP provider, although it too is encouraging customers to use AT&T through discounted access.

The DellEPro service "is all about customers asking, how can I be like Dell?" said Jeff Hamlin, director of business development for Dell's Small Business Group. The service will be preloaded upon Dell's Latitude and Inspiron notebooks, and its Dimension and Optiplex desktop PCs.

While the service will be initially oriented around dial-up access, broadband support will be forthcoming, said Gregory Healy, global IP offer manager of worldwide markets for AT&T Internet Services, Bridgewater, New Jersey. The DellEPro service will be privately branded under Dell's name, he said.

For Dell, the combination of the DellEPro service and DellEWorks portal is both a revenue generator and a tool to help Dell plan for its customers' needs. "We're trying to understand what customers want," Healy said.

Since February, Dell's DellEWorks.com site already has established a suite of online applications designed to allow customers to enable a Web presence, promote it, and manage it. Dell's DellEWorks.com service works in conjunction with the Dell Hosting Group, which provides shared web hosting services and Trellix Web publishing software, as well as either a shared or dedicated server, from as little as $14.95 a month, said Tim Mattox, vice-president and general manager of the Hosting Group.

On June 15, Dell added domain-name registration with Network Solutions for $25 per year. More than 2,000 customers have signed on for hosting services since the first quarter, when the program began.

The new partnerships will enhance the ability of Dell's customers to manage its online business. Through partnerships with Works.com, OneCore.com, and Eletter.com, Dell has added online purchasing, financial management, and direct mail capabilities to its service pantheon, respectively.

Works.com, among other capabilities, allows buyers to purchase business PCs over the Internet, although Dell has not persuaded Works.com to exclusively offer Dell PCs, Hamlin said.

The goal is for those services to communicate with one another, allowing an IT manager to, say, purchase additional online storage space or a new PC, and to have those purchases automatically reflected in the online accounting software. Hamlin admitted that level of interaction has not been achieved yet, but said the company is explaining to its partners that interactivity is a condition of doing business with Dell.

That left HP and vJungle.com executives with something to crow about.

"The key word is integrated," said Deepak Amin, chief executive of vJungle. "Anybody can aggregate content."

As part of HP's three-legged strategy of providing e-service management tools through Internet infrastructure products and information appliances, the company has developed an HP-branded partnership with vJungle. The small business portal will be surrounded by HP's standard navigation buttons common to its web site, a key part of leveraging the HP brand, said Hillary Glann, product marketing manager of HP's mobile computing division in Cupertino, Calif.

The small- and medium-business vJungle website will serve both as an integrated-services hub, a collection of front- and back-office software, and a platform for future HP services. By using a single e-services provider, HP can ensure that the products will work together. So-called "e-center" software links will be included on new HP business notebooks or Brio business PCs.

"We've had e-hardware stores for about a year, and now we want to open up an e-services store," explained Michael Weir, general manager of HP's small-business organization in Santa Clara, Calif.

Weir also explained that those e-services now include a deal with FutureOne, which acquired Estonian software house Datalane in March. Datalane, and now FutureOne, allows data to be managed across a variety of systems, including a cellular phone.

"So if I need to send a file to Mike so I can keep my job, I can scroll through the menu on my cellular phone and eventually find it," Glann said. A WAP-enabled phone is not necessary, although the WAP protocol will allow access to a wider variety of options.

Finally, HP intends to become a provider of IT-outsourcing services through an online IT initiative. Weir said the subscription-based service, called IT Manager, will allow IT managers to easily deploy and manage software and systems deployment over the Internet.

"The IT Manager is the first step in the concept of HP becoming an IT generator," Weir said.