Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[HailMary]

I've seen several posts about Dell's adoption of Opteron being insignificant because of the low volumes involved. It seems to me, though, that Dell has a more important concern: they don't want their large, tied-up customers to add HP or Sun as approved corporate suppliers.

You are on to something here.

I know of a couple of companies who buy Dell exclusively because of some kind of service arrangement they have with them, and they will not consider using other vendors unless they are forced to. One of the IT people at one of these companies has said they are reconsidering their policy because they are needing some Opteron Linux boxes for 64-bit development. Once the door is open to another vendor, it could mean a whole lot more machines are purchased through that alternate vendor.

Dell has already offered some larger customers Opteron machines manufactured by another company but under their service contract just to keep these customers happy. This is what was witnessed not too long ago with that Opteron page on Dell's website.

I think it may have finally come to the point that Dell is seeing enough customer demand for Opteron systems that they are going to introduce their own Opteron lineup.