Dell wades into web hardware market with five point plan

Dell Computer will start selling web servers next month in a bid to cut itself a slice of the booming internet hardware market.

The supplier, which built its business by selling desktop PCs, announced a five-point plan yesterday to target the estimated $370bn that companies are expected to spend on expanding their internet infrastructure by 2003.

Dell has announced new PowerApp appliance servers for web serving, caching and load balancing, which will ship with Windows or Linux stacks next month.

Lindy Lesperance, analyst at Technology Business Research Analysts, said: "Dell typically waits for a market to mature before getting into it, but once it does it quickly uses its efficient manufacturing and distribution to roll over competitors."

Dell also unveiled its Service Provider Direct initiative - a range of resources, programmes and alliances for internet and application service providers and web hosting companies.