Summary
Michael Dell is no slouch and is leading his company into new arenas. Dell recently moved on the SMB space with ATT. Now Dell is gearing up for acquisitions. Data Centers? Hand Helds? New Arenas?
Analysis
The commoditization of the PC and pursuit of recurring enterprise contracts has caused major shifts in market players HP (acquisitions of LeftHand, EDS), Oracle (acquisition of Sun), Cisco (acquisitions of Richards-Zeta and Pure Digital) and IBM (acquisitions of Transitive and Exeros). Dell has no choice but to follow suit. Or does it? Many are speculating that Dell will attack the same enterprise data center space.
Michael Dell has a history of innovation. He can think way outside the box. The current box: data center consolidation, outsourcing, virtualization and storage changes (deduplication, RAID-on-a-chip, SSD).
So, the question is will Dell act conservatively and jump into the same box with IBM, HP, Oracle and Cisco. Or, will they attack the consumer arena (that has been so good to them) in new ways. Apple did it and won big. Dell is very capable of doing the same thing.
Since Dell has already announced new positions within the SMB space, I would look for them to do two things over the next six months:
1) Strengthen their position in enterprise.
2) Evolve their position in the consumer space.
Possible acquisitions in the enterprise space: NetApp, Brocade, Emulex, QLogic, BMC, 3Com
Possible acquisitions in the consumer space: Motorola, Palm, IRiver, High Tech Computer.
