Alienware Area-51 7500

History

According to employees, the Alienware name was chosen because of the founders' fondness for the hit television series The X-Files, hence the theme to their products, with names such as Grey and Area-51. Alienware was originally established to tap a niche in the high performance game market, which back then was not on the radar of the major PC manufacturers such as Dell. Since high-end game hardware was not widely distributed, the company's founders formed an OEM that sold personal computers with the highest performing hardware and settings according to benchmarks.

Operations

As of FY 2005, Alienware brought in upwards of $170 million USD in annual sales, while minimizing expenses to aid an international expansion initiative launched in 2003 to maintain a presence in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom and Costa Rica. In 2002, Alienware distributed their systems through Best Buy and CompUSA at retail locations. Because of complications with that method of distribution, Alienware decided to better service the customer via direct sales and have since eschewed such an indirect retail presence. Alienware has had a call center in Costa Rica to handle all sales and support calls for a number of years.