Yesterday was the first day of the Dell Services and Solutions for the Virtual Era analyst event, nicely for me, in Austin. While there’s a well known consumer and server side to Dell, much of their future-looking life tied up on growing their “enterprise” credentials and offerings. Rather than just selling hardware, Dell wants to be the type of “partner” to businesses that you see larger tech vendors like IBM, HP, and Oracle playing. This is totally appropriate and where growth for a vendor comes from.

Dell’s Barton George de-briefed me, as it were, in a quick video, above. I’ll steal his summary of topics:

• What his clients ask him about Dell and what, as a result was he looking for today
• Dell’s focus on solutions and de-emphasis on technology
• Is Dell putting on its big boy pants?
• The value of expanding on Dell’s success in select verticals

There’s more in this second day. I’m especially looking to see how Dell is packaging up its various offerings and services to target specific business types (health-care is a favorite with the lead recent acquisition Perot has there) and more “horizontal” applications like cloud (their VMware, OpenStack, Azure, and more portfolio is numerous, maybe too much so), big data/analytics, evolving ERP infrastructure (things like SAP HANA, but also knowing how to slice up an existing ERP stack to take advantage of new technologies without having to do major re-writes – there’s some mention of that in Smart Cloud land), getting cloud economics, mobile backends, and so forth from the “hot, exciting, and new pile” of technologies.

Disclosure: Dell i a client, as are Microsoft and IBM.