Michael Dell wants you to know that PCs are NOT what Dell is all about.
So not.
Speaking on stage at the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Aspen, Colo., today, the Dell founder made a point that the company was focused on the $75 trillion enterprise IT market.
"The last five years we've made a shift," Dell said. "We're in four businesses."
Those are:
- The PC business
- Enterprise data center gear (servers, storage, and networking)
- Software and system security
- Services
"We make about one-third of the servers that are in the Internet," said Dell. In the enterprise hardware category, he said, "we've done about 25 acquisitions in the last few years."
And in the fourth category, Dell noted, "of the 110, 000 people at Dell, about 45,000 are in services.
"We are not competing with Apple in many places for sure," Dell said. "We are competing in PCs and the tablet with Windows 8. But look if you look at their core business, the iPhone, we're securing iPhones and how companies manage that."
The stock market doesn't seem to get it yet, but Dell said he's not focused on that. The stock crashed in the spring from above $18 to about $12 today.
"The market has been pretty tough," Dell said. "I'll let the market decide [the] price of stock. Our job is to build a great company. I've been doing this for 28 years and I'd like to be doing it for many more years to come."
So for the long haul, Dell is investing, investing, investing. He knows Dell's results "have been volatile" but said they are moving in an upward direction.
"We're making significant changes," he said, including more than "$5 billion dollars so far in acquisitions."
He said the company is also "investing in organic growth as well," such as a $60 million venture fund focused on storage that Dell announced today.
