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This is the first time I can remember an IT person being cast in a positive business light. Most advertising portraying IT folks (meaning us) leans heavily on the geek stereotype. But the Dell spots highlight a guy who did a great thing for his company by purchasing Dell's gear and, in turn, cutting operating costs and delivering true ROI (is there such a thing?). Complex business issues to which IT was thought to be oblivious are being aligned with a guy in a short-sleeve shirt and a bad tie (OK, so a little of the geek is still there).

But not many "traditional" business people would believe the IT geeks care about the business impact of technology purchases. When we began planning this issue's cover package on enterprise server hardware: "Servers: The Next Generation," we visualized it as a strict testing and evaluation piece -- heavy on raw performance data and architecture analysis and light on business content. As our executive editor Bruce Boardman would say, we would be "sticking to our knitting."

But once contributing editor Art Wittmann and technology editor Steve Schuchart got cracking on the subject, the story became much more than a traditional review. Read through it and you'll find the hard-core testing for which we're known plus a ton of useful business data -- information on how server architectures impact business costs and how viable the big three -- Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM -- are as business partners.

A business partner is what most organizations are looking for in a technology vendor. You need companies that will be there for the long run and continue to improve their products and service offerings so they grow with your business. There's a reason IT departments label themselves by their vendor of choice: "We're an IBM shop" or "We're an Apple shop." Heterogeneous server environments are difficult to operate and costly to maintain, so there's little value in buying from a deal-of-the-week vendor. That's the message Dell and other hardware vendors are pushing. A message that IT and the business execs are starting to hear.

If you recognize the guy in the commercials, please blast me a message with his name. That way I can go back to watching TV the way I've been taught: by shutting off my brain and succumbing to subliminal messaging.

Please check back here next issue for an important guest column. I'll be on the sidelines while Amy Lipton, our editor of operations, reveals some noteworthy information about Network Computing. I won't steal Amy's thunder but keep this in mind: Change is good. And in this case, it's quite good.