Dell and LANDesk Get a Little Closer

Dell is looking to increase its ties to LANDesk, a provider of desktop, server and patch management software, as a way of offering more comprehensive enterprise administration tools for the vendor's line of PCs and servers.

Dell, based in Round Rock, Texas, already offers LANDesk's Server Manager software with a few select models from its server line. The May 2 joint announcement will expand that agreement to include all of Dell's PowerEdge Server systems, as well as its enterprise line of Optiplex desktops and Latitude notebooks, according to the two companies.

In a statement, Dell executives added that this new agreement is just the beginning of an expanding relationship, and the company will offer more hardware integrated with LANDesk's management software in the future.

For its part, LANDesk is joining Dell's OpenManage Certified Partner Program, which will give the Salt Lake City, Utah, company access to one of world's largest IT vendors. In addition to expanding its customer base within the enterprise space, LANDesk will gain access to Dell's technology and development resources.

For Dell, the agreement shows that it wants to offer more to its enterprise customers than inexpensive servers and PCs. By offering more management tools to ease the burden on IT managers - as well as an expanded services offering announced earlier this year - the company is looking to match similar offerings from its main competitors: IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems.

This move also comes at a time when Dell, which has watched as HP and others have taken away some of its share of the worldwide PC market, is taking several steps to show that it can still offer innovative technologies, while remaining extremely competitive when it comes to price.

"Our integration of Dell OpenManage with LANDesk system management solutions will drive integrated management tools that optimize service availability across the enterprise, while enabling customers to minimize their management and ownership costs - from the desktop to the data center," Ed Reynolds, senior manager of Dell's OpenManage Software marketing, wrote in a statement accompanying the announcement.

As part of this agreement, Dell will work to integrate LANDesk's latest management software offerings with its own OpenManage feature, which includes tools such as a management console and graphical monitoring abilities that track such data as temperature thresholds.

Later, the two companies plan to develop new software suites exclusively for Dell products.

Dell will start selling LANDesk software with its servers and PCs immediately. The recommended price for the LANDesk Server Manager is $129 per node; the price for the LANDesk Management Suite is $89 per node; and the price for the LANDesk Security Suite is $59 per node.

Copyright 2007 by Ziff Davis Media, Distributed by United Press International