In a recent interview with eWEEK, Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager of Dell's Server Platforms business, said that even though the company is rapidly intensifying its push to become less of a box maker and more of a solutions provider, servers will still be a key piece of the equation.

"We still see the server business being very highly [profitable], with very strong growth," Norrod said, pointing to such drivers as cloud computing, virtualization and the migration of workloads from RISC and mainframes to x86-based environments.

Dell's numbers from the fourth quarter of 2011 support Norrod's view. According to figures released by Dell Feb. 15, revenue for enterprise solutions and services grew 7 percent over the same period last year -- and are now almost a third of all of the company's revenue -- and server revenue jumped 16 percent.

In addition, server revenue in all three categories -- large enterprise, small and midsize business, and the public sector -- all saw growth of 14 percent to 22 percent.

During the interview with eWEEK -- conducted before Dell released its numbers -- Norrod said the cloud would continue to drive business to the company. Dell has become a strong server provider to various cloud and hyperscale computing environments, from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft to Yahoo. Norrod said he doesn't expect that trend to tail off any time soon.

For more, read the eWeek article: Dell Makes Headway with Server Business.

test