UPDATED 10:45 EDT / FEBRUARY 29 2012

Dell’s Not a PC Company Anymore, But that’s Only Half the Story

Consumer manufacturing giant Dell is apparently not interested in the title of a PC company anymore.

“It’s not really a PC company; it’s an end-to-end IT company,” Michael Dell said at an event in San Francisco where the company launched a new line of PowerEdge servers aimed at businesses with remote computing needs.”

It seems that just like Hewlett-Packard, Dell is trying to bail out of the PC industry – an area that has been seriously disrupted by mobile devices, namely the iPad and its Android-based counterparts. Overall this resulted in a very noticeable decline in worldwide demand for desktops, and the outlook is full of gloom and doom as tablets make technological leaps at a very rapid pace.

Dell is looking towards the larger enterprise market as its big opportunity to push through the current turmoil, especially in light of its disappointing quarter, which led to a sharp decline in its shares price. But the main barrier is the reality that PC sales still account for a very large portion of the company’s business: Dell’s consumer unit generated $3.2 billion in revenue, behind the enterprise group’s $4.91 billion. ZDNet  pointed out that nearly half of the latter figure is accounted by corporate PC sales.

The bottom line: Dell is not an enterprise-only vendor just yet. But it’s getting there, or at least that’s the plan. The company just debuted the 12th generation of PowerBlade servers, which feature 10 Gigabit Ethernet support, flash components and other new elements that – while represent a big boost to the product family – still fall short of what Gen8 has to offer.

The second barrier that stands between Dell and the enterprise market is the tremendous amount of competition it has to deal with first; Hewlett-Packard’s ProLiant Generation 8 turned out to be the ace in the hole, ushering in a new era for the PC maker as it eyes the enterprise.


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