Michael Dell emphasizes enterprise solutions over PC sales

Dell is a huge PC maker with more than $62 billion in its last fiscal year. But the company is shifting its emphasis to IT solutions for the enterprise rather than just pure PC hardware.

In that respect, Dell’s playbook is looking a lot like that of IBM, which sold off its PC hardware division, and Hewlett-Packard, which has moved heavily into enterprise software.

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Dell is “not really a PC company,” CEO Michael Dell said at an event in San Francisco. “It’s an end-to-end IT solutions company. … Our conversations with customers are very different today. They want us to know the challenges in their business and how we can address them faster and better. It’s about transforming data into insights, boosting flexibility, and becoming more agile. Customers want to see innovation that makes a difference for them.”

Enterprise sales accounted for about 30 percent of the company’s revenue last year and 50 percent of the operating income in the last quarter.

“The line between IT and the business is disappearing,” at customers, he said. “It is becoming essential to how they all conduct their businesses. They want choices about where their technology lives, from the hybrid cloud to public cloud infrastructure.”

Dell is investing $1 billion in its own web hosting infrastructure at 10 solution centers around the world. In the past two years, Dell has made 12 acquisitions, many of them in cloud, security, and data protection markets. The company has $18 billion in cash, up 21 percent from a year ago. So you can expect it to make more acquisitions.

“It’s a changing world and Dell is transforming to stay ahead of this,” Dell said.

Here’s a link to the video replay of Dell’s event.

[Photo credit: Justin.tv]