Michael Dell says Dell 'not really a PC company.'
Dell Chief Executive Michael Dell distanced the company he founded from the slow-growing, low-margin PC business as he announced a new portfolio of servers and services at an event in San Francisco Monday.
"[Dell] is not really a PC company, it's an end-to-end IT company that really understands the needs of its customers,' Dell said.
The remarks come after Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook asserted Apple is the "only" company innovating in the personal computer industry at Apple's annual shareholder meeting last week.
Rather than respond to Apple, Dell took a shot at Hewlett-Packard. Unlike HP, Apple isn't a player in the data-intensive businesses Dell is targeting.
Dell's remarks come as Dell made a spate of geeky announcements Monday. Dell announced support for 10 gigabit Ethernet networking throughout its server, storage and networking portfolio; new blade, rack, and tower hardware; and new storage systems based on the EqualLogic storage business it acquired in 2007.
Dude, you're getting a makeover
Michael Dell has been slowly reshaping the company he founded over the past five years, shifting into higher margin products and services targeting corporate data centers even as Dell continues cranking out the personal computers it was best known for during the 1990s.
Making a veiled reference to HP ("a company not too far from here that has a few less letters in its name than we do"), Dell argued new servers its rival announced earlier this year include features long found in his own products.
Dell said his company's servers have had the kind of embedded lifecycle management features that HP announced since 2009. "We were looking over the list of so-called innovations and some of them looked really familiar," Dell said. "A huge number of these so called innnovations were in our 11th generation servers that we announced in 2009."
Kicking HP's...
Others at Dell were blunter. Introducing his colleague, Forrest Norrod, general manager of Dell’s server platforms busniess ; Praveen Asthana, vice president of enterprise solutions and strategy at Dell quipped: “Forrest is going to come here on a scooter because his leg is sore from kicking HP’s ass.”
The smack talk comes as Dell has been eager to emphasize that it does much than just the file-and-print sharing grunt work that have long been tackled by PC-based servers, and spotlight its work with more data-intensive tasks.
Dell shares rose $0.21, or 1.2%, to 17.64 in mid-day trading Monday.
