Micheal Dell wants you to know that the real money for his company has nothing to do with PCs or Windows 8. It's about selling data center software, hardware, and services to enterprises.
But not everyone believes Dell is growing its enterprise business fast enough to offset its shrinking PC business.
Thanks to a slew of acquisitions, Dell says he now has an $8 billion-a-year enterprise services business on his hands, plus $1.5 billion a year in software sales, and he's only just begun.
In an interview with the VAR Guy's Joe Panettieri, Dell says that his company's share is just 1 percent of an $800 billion market.
And the company vastly expanded its software business when it bought Quest Software last summer.
He also offered up a whole bunch of other stats on Dell's enterprise business:
- Dell sees 32 billion security events per day between its two security products SecureWorks and SonicWall.
- Dell manages 114 million devices that are "mission critical" to its customers, including workstations and servers.
- The company has 656 locations worldwide where it keeps spare parts for its ProSupport service, which promises on-site service within four hours.
- Dell's InSite One cloud service for the health care industry hosts more than 5 billion medical images.
Some Wall Street analysts are starting to become believers in Dell's move to new businesses, including Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu. Dell reports results for its third fiscal quarter on Thursday, and Wu expects a meet or beat on "very low bar" expectations, the analyst wrote in a research report issued today.
Wu expects strong results in Dell's enterprise business to help offset another decline in its PC business.
But he also said Dell isn't moving fast enough with its transition.
"Despite efforts to grow beyond a PC company with multiple acquisitions over the past few years, we estimate 65%-70% of its business is still tied to PCs," Wu wrote. "We still believe DELL needs to take bolder, more aggressive steps to reinvent itself."
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