For a long time, we kept hearing "Dude! You're gettin' a Dell!" spewing from TV commercials, and honestly, it was rather catchy despite being a little annoying in the process. Now we don't hear anything of the sort from the once-dominant PC company. Oh that's right: Dell isn't a PC company any longer even though a slight majority of its revenue stems from the PC sector.
CNET reports that Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell reportedly talked about everything but the PC sector during a conference hosted by Fortune on Tuesday. He covered corporate servers, storage, networking, security and IT services. In fact, he publicly admitted that his company has made a concerted shift to end-to-end IT services over the last five years. The days of Dell being a PC-focused company, it seems, are over.
This is the "new Dell," he told conference attendees. It's a company shifting away from the PC sector as the industry supposedly moves into the Post-PC era. A majority of Dell's research and development -- not to mention billions of dollars in acquisitions -- has focused on transforming the company. Dell has also made the transition without the burden of a lot of older legacy businesses, unlike rival Hewlett-Packard.
Still, Dell is "entrenched" in the PC sector nonetheless. Currently it's #4 in PC shipments, averaging 10.7-percent of the market, down from 12.1-percent just a year ago. Dell still plans to compete in the consumer market, taking on Apple both in the PC and tablet sectors. The company is lined up to be one of the first companies to produce a Windows 8 tablet later this year, but don't expect Dell to fight Lenovo or HP to be the top-most PC player.
Dell told the conference attendees that the new company's growth stems from securing devices like iPhones and iPad tablets -- devices which fuel Apple's growth -- and allowing those devices to work with corporate systems. He also said the company was starting a $60 million venture fund devoted to storage.
"It's an enormous opportunity," Dell said. "Storage has been a huge area for us."
He added that one major area of growth has been China. The company has a large presence in mission critical systems, and even around 60-percent of the country's internet runs through its servers. China is the largest market outside the States for the company, yet sales growth is slowing, causing concern for not only Dell, but many other companies as well.
