Dell Hardware Certification

I suspect it's hardware certification for Dell accepting 3rd party troubleshooting.

 

Where I worked, until retirement, our hardware help desk did troubleshooting and reported problems to vendors, rather than our users calling the vendors direct.  With almost all vendors, whatever we determined was the problem, they took action on that, including sending replacement parts, or a tech, whichever was applicable.  This included IBM, UNISYS, AT&T and other vendors.  The new "IWS/LAN" contract for new LAN systems had Dell servers (and later Dell workstations) but Dell would not accept our hardware help desk's troubleshooting and diagnosis until they were certified by Dell.  Special training classes were held for our hardware help desk tech's (and our MSCE's) so we could continue our usual procedures.  Being a large Federal Goverment Agency with 1800 LAN systems and 55,000 workstations we had clout with convincing Dell that we wanted to do it "our way".