Consumer manufacturers Dell and Hewlett-Packard are looking towards the cloud as a means to bail out on a fragile PC industry, and both of the mega-vendors are working on massive initiatives to realize their respective but not dissimilar plans.

Dell is looking to become a one-stop-shop SaaS vendor, according to Bill Odell, senior director of SMB cloud solutions marketing for the company. He cited a poll that found 69 percent of SMBs, Dell’s main audience in this field and quite a few others, would like to buy their cloud apps from a single vendor. And perhaps not surprisingly, cloud-based analytics is also included in the hardware giant’s vision.

Odell says that Dell is currently cooking up its own cloud-based analytics applications – something to “replace all those Excel sheets and macros” that SMBs use to run themselves – and will partner with other SaaS companies and make strategic acquisitions of SaaS apps to flesh out its app portfolio. In effect, Dell wants to become an Apple store for SaaS apps for SMBs, and make money providing the Boomi bridges between them.”

This would be facilitated via agreements with various SaaS providers, and providing a standard SLA with them as well.

While Dell is developing apps and making partnerships, Hewlett-Packard is making its move further down the stack.  The New York Times reports that the HP Cloud Services PaaS will launch in less than two months, revealing some new details about this plan. Apparently the main idea is to offer developers a broad set of tools, which will hopefully differentiate the AWS competitor from other vendors. That may not be that hard in light of all the early support it’s getting from companies such as Stackato maker ActiveState.

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