The IT industry is consolidating and Dell is taking all the right steps to adapt its business, according to IDC  executive vice president and chief researcher Crawford Del Prete. The analyst stopped by theCube during last week’s second annual Dell World conference to cover all the latest trends  and more (full video below).

Del Prete says the market is going to struggle in 2013: his firm expects revenue growth to stand at 5 to 7 percent in the coming year, considerably less than the usual 10 to 15 percent the industry has gotten used to. IT is maturing, and such rapid gains can no longer be sustained on an industry-wide scale.

Del Prete predicts that vendors will have a much harder time competing in this increasingly cutthroat environment, a trend that he believes will likely lead to a lot of consolidation on the long run.   But, he adds, Dell is staying ahead of the curve: deals such as Compellent, Force10, Quest and other acquisitions are helping it expand its footprint in a maintainable fashion.

While there are some gaps to be filled, the hardware giant is gaining share across the three top verticals: storage, networking and servers.  HP and Cisco are also growing, but primary in the latter two areas.

The executive moves on to discuss the CIO angle.  He says that in his interactions with IDC readership he has observed two distinct approaches: some CIOs share the ‘race to the zero’ mentality, while others are bent on leveraging technology to grow their business. The latter is a lot more complicated than the more straight-forward goal of saving money, but organization seem to know what they want; it’s all about cloud and virtualization.

On that note, Del Prete shares some of the challenges faced by a market researcher who wishes to quantity usage trends. He goes on to talk about Michael Dell’s metaphor for the current state of IT, the rise of ODMs, and several other topics that you can find in the full session with John Furrier and Dave Vellante.