The once docile Dell has turned ultra-aggressive in its war with HP.

Dell staffers were confronted by Caesar's Palace security forces, as they tried to invade the HP Americas Partner Conference in Las Vegas this past week. The "highly-efficient and professional" Roman troops prevented Dell from bombarding all 1,100 HP partners with marketing material. Still, Dell felt pleased that it fed propaganda to some 800 attendees.

In the past, you'd never expect such behavior from Dell. The hardware maker was happy enough to operate in the background, avoiding a lot of the mud-slinging that splatters across the likes of HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems.

Now, however, Dell wants to give off the impression of a hip, energetic firm and even blogged with pride about its HP harassment. Dell also wants to get its channel play going.

"This is playing to win and we will continue to find innovative ways to go on the offense," wrote Dell's Chief Marketing Officer Mark Jarvis.

The Dell ads centered on the company's own partner play - PartnerDirect.

"Based on the feedback from our partners, we know that features such as Deal Registration, pricing, certification paths, EqualLogic storage and no messy rebates are what has brought us tens of thousands of channel partners to-date," Jarvis wrote. " We expect those same PartnerDirect features may appeal to HP partners who got the message in Las Vegas last week."

We've placed a call into HP corporate to see just what Hurd's House thinks about this state of affairs. ®

More comments…

Related stories

IBM offers 4,000 frequent flyer miles per core to abandon HP (8 April 2008)
Vista volume activation cracked (4 March 2008)
HP, Dell and Fujitsu answer VMware's USB stick plea (26 February 2008)
Reins put on key Vista SP1 update as Microhoo! is released into the wild (22 February 2008)
Server vendors fight off doom and gloom in Q4 (22 February 2008)
Sun unfurls four-core Xeon-fueled blade memory hole (21 February 2008)
Dell tells channel: You're not just a bit on the side (20 February 2008)
Some firm named Unisys does something (20 February 2008)
Dell's Soviet style two-year plan results in fresh blade servers (21 January 2008)
From water wheels to the Google brain (18 January 2008)
BusinessWeek novel turns Google's cloud into epic hero (18 December 2007)