Michael Dell plots a grand transition

Dell will develop products for the cloud and specific industries, in a shift away from a purely PC business, the company's chief executive has said.

The strategic shift means the company will service larger and larger companies with a mixture of software and hardware products, Michael Dell said on Thursday.

"We have a new Dell," he said at the inaugural Dell World conference, in Austin, Texas. "Technology is no longer the tool that enables business, it is the business."

The CEO picked out Boomi, a software-as-a-service company that Dell acquired in November, as emblematic of the PC specialist's new strategy.

"[Boomi] sits in the cloud, it connects everything," he said. "It's a very interesting space for us — it's right at the cutting edge of how you make a cloud service deployable and practical."

His comments come at an interesting time for the Round Rock, Texas-based company. Its chief competitor, HP, is transitioning from one CEO to another while trying to reassure the market that it is still committed to the PC business. Meanwhile, Dell is in the midst of moving up the stack to provide more products targeted at the larger enterprise, thanks to a spree of acquisitions of networking, storage and cloud companies.

The conference itself represents a shift for Dell: it's the first major event it has held and the show floor is full of stands demonstrating products targeted at specific industries such as healthcare or manufacturing. Software, by ZDNet UK’s reckoning, takes up a least a third of the exhibit space even though Dell is chiefly known for its PC and server hardware.

Dell also took the opportunity to wheel out some tried-and-tested swipes at HP which he had given at Oracle OpenWorld the previous week and to the Financial Times before that.