Varicent makes software that’s intended to automatically collect and analyze sales data not only from a company’s finance and sales operations, but also from its human resources and IT departments. The point — and if this doesn’t describe an IBM-like view of the world I don’t know what does — is to gain efficiencies, discover unknown trends and, as always, boost sales.

In more practical terms, it means, according to a note from Brian Marshall at ISI out this morning, that Varicent’s software makes it easier for companies to “optimize compensation, streamline territory assignments, manage quotas, analyze sales activities and prepare for audits.”

Founded in 2003, it had raised $35 million in venture capital from FTV Capital, RBC Venture Partners and Edgestone Capital. It has 180 customers including Hertz, Manpower, Office Depot and Starwood.

Marshall goes on to argue that IBM is the company best positioned to capitalize on the expected $10 billion business in analytics. Varicent would be its sixth recent deal in the space: Others include Algorithmics, Clarity Systems, OpenPages, Cognos and SPSS.

And while terms haven’t been disclosed, IBM, Marshall says, has indicated that the return on its software acquisitions has been better than it has been in several years. It also looks like Big Blue’s dealmaking it on a serious upswing: After spending about $6 billion on acquisitions in 2010 it cut back to only $2 billion in 2011. Marshall argues that IBM is going to be busy buying companies: “We expect continued activity this year and see IBM as among the best in large-cap technology at building high-value capabilities through acquisition.”

IBM shares fell by $1.09, or about a half percentage point, to $204.23 by 10 am ET. The shares are up almost 12 percent this year, and earlier this month hit a lifetime high of $210.69.

It’s not so much about any shifts in sentiment or intention for spending among large companies, it’s just that the dollar is currently strong against other currencies, so U.S.-domiciled companies are in a weaker position when selling to customers in other countries. When accounting for that discrepancy, Gartner says it expects overall growth in spending of 2.5 percent, but on a constant currency basis, the digits would be transposed for a healthier 5.2 percent.

Spending by governments will likely contract, thanks in no small part to the austerity measures being put in place in the euro zone.

The highest rate of growth will be in the telecommunications equipment sector, which will grow by nearly 7 percent, Gartner says. A lot of that is thanks to mobile going to mobile, but also to speeding up networks. See the rest of the segments and their expected rates of growth in the table I screengrabbed from the press release, below:

Earlier this week, Gartner singled out IT spending in emerging economies, which it said will amount to an impressive trillion and change by itself. And last week we got a glance at the sentiment from 100 CIOs at large enterprises, courtesy of J.P. Morgan, indicating that growth is likely to tick upward this year. Up is good.

Now you understand why executives at large tech companies like Intel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems get so excited when they talk about places like Brazil, India and elsewhere.

Brazil in particular is just a big part of a surging Latin American region, Gartner says, where spending will total $326 billion; nearly half of that in the professional sector, the other half in consumer.

By adding Mexico, Gartner also adds a fifth member to the four-country BRIC club comprised of Brazil, Russia, India and China. The five countries that make up the BRIMC club will account for 17 percent, or $658 billion, of IT spending this year, the firm says.

The Asia Pacific Region will account for the most among the emerging economies: $496 billion. The Middle East and Africa will account for $244 billion in spending, more than a third of that coming from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and South Africa. Central and Eastern Europe, led by Russia and followed by Poland and the Czech Republic, will account for $158 billion.

Luis Anavitarte, the Gartner analyst who led the study, says that while that seems like an awful lot of healthy spending, buyers are still cautious. He said in a statement that he expects to see aggressive efforts made to go after new consumer buyers in all of these countries, which brings to mind Apple’s aggressive retail push in China. Also, expect to see a lot of spending on cloud computing and mobile technologies at the office.

(Image taken from what someone thinks a trillion-dollar bill might look like. Of course, no such bill exists.)

But in the process, companies are making a lot of the same mistakes — from not researching ahead of time how workers can best use the devices, to underestimating the costs and the additional challenges tablets present for IT networks.

Here’s a rundown of five of the biggest mistakes, and what companies have learned from them.

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Veghte joined HP in 2010 after 20 years at Microsoft, where he managed the $15 billion Windows business and oversaw the launch of Windows 7. At HP, he has been credited with growing its software revenue by 18 percent last year.

Given Veghte’s history as a software guy, his appointment to this role can’t help but be seen as a key signal by CEO Meg Whitman of the role she sees software playing in HP’s strategy going forward. That was one of the things I asked Veghte about when we spoke by phone earlier this week.

AllThingsD: What, in your view, is the role of the chief strategy officer at HP, and what do you expect it to entail in the coming year?

Bill Veghte: As we’re out talking to customers, they’d like to buy more from HP; they’d like HP to be more successful. They look at the advances we’re making in networking or storage or printers, but they want to know why the whole is greater than the sum of is parts. What is HP’s strategy for continued leadership in the market transitions that are going on? And some customers would say that where HP is concerned, that’s not a fully realized opportunity.

And you’re coming at it from the software part of the business, and we’ve heard from Meg saying she’d like to grow opportunities in software. Your appointment, to me, sends a bit of a signal that software is going to be a big part of HP’s strategy to get things turned around. Is that accurate?

I think, certainly, as I talk to Meg and Ray [Lane, HP chairman], and with the members of the executive committee, I’ve found that this is a catalyzing role. If done right, there are different models of strategy in different Fortune 500 companies. And the one that makes sense here is catalyzing with other business units. Whether that’s Vijay Joshi in printing and imaging, or with Todd Bradley in PCs, or John Visentin in the enterprise group, there’s a strategy that each one of those is trying, and which is accretive to a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. And so, to the extent that software is glue or networking is glue, I think it’s a statement that has more to do with a pan-HP strategy than something that’s specific to software.

What’s Job One, starting on your first day?

Job One is making sure that as we have those conversations with customers, they see an HP that is unified around a set of constructs and offerings that deliver what they need. It’s different from having offerings that are, by themselves, individually great. It’s about having unifying themes and constructs.

It seems that you’re talking about finding a way to routinely and thoughtfully combine different things that HP makes or does, in ways they aren’t being done now. Is that what you’re getting at?

I think that very accurately characterizes the opportunity. When we talk to the leadership team, we hear a lot of the same thing. There is a lot of great stuff within HP, whether you get that in terms of market position, or IP, or people. I like how you put that: How do you routinely and thoughtfully combine things, particularly in light of the market inflections that are happening. We are in a tectonic shift, and that can be an opportunity, if you clearly spell out the value proposition for customers. Not only in each one of the units, but where you’re thoughtfully combining them so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

I thought of an example around meeting the needs of the market. There was an IHS iSuppli report out earlier this week about cloud servers, which are growing. But customers are going to Taiwanese ODM companies to get customized products, while at the same time cloud servers are growing generally. Is this the sort of thing that might affect HP?

I was talking to Dave Donatelli [general manager of Enterprise Servers] about this recently. It’s interesting, because it seems like in more recent months it has flipped back, because of the integration within that customization. A great example that Dave and I have been working on is the whole cloud system piece. You’ve got a lot of great stuff in automation and orchestration software that is inherently cross-platform, and which crosses virtualization engines and marrying that deeply with the converged infrastructure. We’re the only company that can give you a single stack, soup to nuts, from a single vendor. The core construct is that there’s a lot of private cloud build-out going on, and those customers who are doing it are saying they don’t want to be the systems integrator for six different vendors, and they also prefer not to be locked in to a single vertical stack. That’s a huge advantage for us. And to your point about routinely and thoughtfully combining, we should do exactly that. It’s been doing well for us in the marketplace, but how do you make that routine against the opportunities we see in the marketplace?

You spent about 20 years at Microsoft. How does that inform what you’re bringing to this job?

At the core, any of these jobs are about identifying and exploiting market shifts for customers. I had the privilege of having a front-row seat during some big marketplace disruptions, and helping catalyze businesses and delivering superior market positions and solutions. It’s all about handling change, and turning it into an opportunity.

Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore expects some difficulties for Big Blue stemming mainly from the company’s exposure to the troubled economies of the euro zone and related currency weaknesses there. He expects the company to report sales of $29.8 billion and per-share earnings of $4.62, with his sales forecast slightly more optimistic than that of the consensus of Wall Street analysts.

Even so, he expects the strength of the U.S. dollar relative to the euro in recent months will create a headwind effect worth about 2 percentage points compared to IBM’s prior forecast in October. “Although the stronger dollar is likely to impact reported revenue, IBM remains one of the most defensive names in our universe due to its high exposure to recurring profit streams, past backlog growth and wide geographic and business diversification,” he wrote in a note to clients yesterday.

Hardware sales should be in line with forecasts as IBM has continued to gain market share away from Hewlett-Packard and Oracle. Services should continue to be a sign of IBM’s strength as its backlog of prior contracts should continue to deliver a stable stream of revenue.

One problem may come from service bookings. Whitmore thinks the consensus estimates on this closely watched number are, at $21.5 billion, a little high and thus could disappoint. IBM announced only five deals in the fourth quarter compared to seven in the same quarter of 2010. And though information about the size of the deals was limited generally, two of them combined to amount to about $740 million. “IBM’s services bookings figure is always a wildcard and the lack of many announced deals clouds visibility,” Whitmore wrote. He rates IBM a buy with a price target of $210.

The earnings report will also be the first with Ginni Rometty as IBM’s new CEO. Having already had a busy first few days on the job, it will be interesting to see if she uses the occasion of an earnings conference call to announce anything new, though that’s unlikely.

Despite everything, corporate spending on IT was going to hold steady, went the conventional wisdom. Big tech companies selling to big companies — except the financial ones — were supposed to have the situation well in hand. All those big companies looking to get things done in a faster, cheaper and more efficient manner would be writing big checks to the big lumbering tech companies, which would translate into operational savings: Faster servers, faster PCs, cloud services, better software.

At least that was the conventional wisdom until today. Now Oracle has gone and harshed whatever buzz there was left. Once investors got their heads around the wider implications of the software giant’s disappointing quarter, they concluded that the entire enterprise tech sector required a sharp spanking. Here’s a rundown of the damage:

• Oracle shares fell by $3.40 or nearly 12 percent, and briefly traded within 20 cents of their 52-week low.
• IBM, recently the engine of steady, dependable tech growth, fell $5.77, or more than 3 percent.
• Cisco Systems fell 49 cents, or more than 2 percent, and teamed up with Big Blue as the day’s worst Dow performers.
• Salesforce.com fell 5 percent.
• VMWare fell nearly 10 percent.
• SAP fell $3.49, or more than 6 percent.
• Hewlett-Packard held up (relatively) better than the rest, falling only 47 cents, or less than 2 percent.

Okay, you get the picture. Investors wanted out of any stock that touched enterprise tech today. Oracle is considered a bellwether. The result was predictable. But does the crux of the argument that fueled today’s fear have any merit? Maybe not.

There are reasons to hope it’s not quite so bad. For example, IT consulting house Accenture, which saw its own stock fall more than 4 percent today, recently reported a pretty good quarter, with record revenues and earnings. Its strength came from $7.8 billion in new bookings, which isn’t exactly a negative indicator.

Second, even if corporate spending does slow down, tech M&A deals could help larger companies grow despite themselves. Oracle, Cisco and IBM have a combined $87 billion in cash and short-term investments among them. And as we’ve seen, there’s still plenty of appetite among large tech companies for gobbling up smaller ones, especially in the red-hot software-as-service space.

Recent examples include SAP’s $3.4 billion acquisition of SuccessFactors, Oracle’s $1.5 billion deal for RightNow, and Salesforce’s grab of Rypple.

And the potential targets are numerous: There’s Taleo, NetSuite, Workday; even newly public Jive Software.

Finally, the currency weakness that has Oracle and so many other companies running uphill when dealing with non-U.S. customers isn’t going to last forever. Yes, it’s true that IT companies like it better when the dollar is weak against the euro. Considered from that angle, Oracle and other global tech companies suffer less from a demand problem than a temporary — though it is going on way too long — currency problem.

But even if the euro crisis does last well into next year, there are still the BRIC countries, which Intel, another significant tech bellwether, can’t stop praising. And — dare I say it? — the U.S. economy is showing signs of coming back to life. In several states, private payrolls are growing just enough to offset the declines in employment at state and local governments, and as new tax revenue flows, government payroll declines will slow, as well. As 2012 wears on, the U.S. might find itself rolling into an honest-to-goodness recovery, which would fuel improvements to IT budgets. Though the hard-drive shortage caused by the flooding in Thailand won’t make this any easier.

So don’t worry. Or don’t worry too much.

Now that there’s a new boss at HP — one who’s staffing up — I’m adding a new image: A paratrooper. After all, despite the fact that HP’s new CEO Meg Whitman is getting things at HP calmed down, there’s still some more drama to come. Anyone taking a new executive job is — by a stretch of phrase — “parachuting in.” Get it? And the parachute picture won’t apply just to HP, either — it also works for posts about other companies that are working through their own dramas. (Cisco Systems, I’m looking at you!)

Anyhow, the paratrooper image also works when you hear where the new guy comes from: Boeing. HP named John Hinshaw, the former vice president and general manager of Boeing Information Solutions, as its new executive vice president of Global Technology and Business Processes.

Hinshaw — who is, by my count, Whitman’s first senior hire since taking over as CEO last month — is 41, and will oversee HP’s information technology and administrative services. He’ll be in charge of procuring service and making sure all the business processes are running as smoothly and efficiently as they should be. It’s a big job, and as such, Hinshaw will be a member of HP’s executive council and report directly to Whitman.

In his previous position, Hinshaw was responsible for running Boeing’s high-growth businesses, which included delivering IT solutions to the U.S. government. Before that, he was Boeing’s CIO responsible for global IT strategy, operations, process and people. Before that, he was senior vice president and CIO at Verizon Wireless. And before that, he was a consultant at Accenture.

In the same announcement, HP also said that Craig Flower has been promoted to senior vice president and CIO. He’s been with HP since 1984 (so no paratrooper for him), and will report to Hinshaw. He’ll oversee data management, applications, global business intelligence and a bunch of other stuff. He’s held a wide range of IT positions within HP, including its e-business operations, customer and sales groups, and the all-important Personal Systems Group. If there’s a guy who knows what’s what at HP, it seems Flower would be it.

Update: As the commenter below just reminded me, Flower is taking the title held by former CIO Randy Mott, who left in HP’s big summer shakeup.

Many industry pundits have talked about the Consumerization of the Enterprise — the idea that enterprise users expect the mobility, integration and ease of consumer technologies in their work lives. People often cite the move to user-purchased mobile devices like the iPhone or user-provisioned collaboration services like Box, DropBox and Yammer as evidence of this phenomenon. And because many of these services have freemium models, IT departments are finding that huge numbers of their employees are already using these services for business purposes in addition to personal ones. So in many ways, consumer expectations are driving the ways enterprise CIOs think.

But what about the other side of the phenomenon? Eddie Murphy’s character Billy Ray Valentine influenced Dan Aykroyd’s character, Louis Winthorphe, III, as much as the reverse. What’s less discussed — but equally fascinating — is the impact of enterprise requirements on the consumerization trend.

Many of the aforementioned start-ups initially focused entirely on end-user needs, providing simple user interfaces and sign-ups, and building multi-million user customer bases in the process. But as these vendors switched focus from user acquisition to monetization, they realized some IT department requirements are legitimate, and more importantly, are barriers to sale.

The most recent example: Box. Box founder Aaron Levie probably never imagined his company would be working with enterprise IT directors in designing his product roadmap when he started his file sharing company, but nonetheless it recently announced partnerships and integrations around identity federation, mobile security, e-discovery, and other IT-centric areas.

In contrast, DropBox has continued to focus heavily on end-user adoption with limited IT focus. Indeed, their total reported user counts dwarf those of Box or any other service. Yet the CIOs I’ve spoken with had a proliferation of users on DropBox and Box when they decided to standardize on a collaboration service. Despite the fact that their companies may have had more DropBox users, Box’s enterprise functionality tipped the scale in its favor. So while user adoption gets you in the door, without some enterprization you don’t get the sale.

Similarly, for Google’s Enterprise team, bringing Gmail to companies involved a lot more than just learning how to charge for the service. Google has spent the past several years trading places with Microsoft, investing in policy management, security, compliance and other IT-centric functionality to address early inhibitors to adoption. And it has worked. Analyst firm Gartner now sees Google as a viable alternative to Exchange for enterprise collaboration.

Indeed, even in the truly consumerized world of mobile devices, iPhones and Androids don’t roam free in most large companies. Many security-sensitive organizations are investing in Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions like those from Good, MobileIron, Zenprise and Symantec, to bring enterprise manageability to smartphones.

The Enterprization of these traditionally consumer apps is going to center around three legitimate enterprise requirements:

1. Data ownership: While enterprises are excited to leverage the flexibility and fluidity of cloud apps, the idea of an enterprise’s intellectual property spread across hundreds of cloud services, many times in user-provisioned accounts where the enterprise has no access, is scary. What if the company is involved in a lawsuit and has to put a user’s data on legal hold? How can the company recover data if the cloud service loses it? And most importantly, how can the company get its data back if it wants to change services? Tough questions if the data is trapped behind a user’s personal cloud account.
2. Data security: Similarly, the thought of sensitive customer information living in cloud accounts where users choose passwords like “password” or, for the more secure, “password1,” is nerve-wracking to a security officer. How can the company ensure that its data is protected with strong passwords? When an employee leaves, how can the company revoke access to all cloud apps at once? Without company administrative rights, the enterprise is dependent on the judgment of the user.
3. Data compliance: Whether data is stored on your G:\ drive or in Gmail, if it’s work-related, for the most part the same compliance rules apply. While SOX, FRCP and GLBA are not as sexy as FourSquare, Angry Birds and AirBnB, they are still critical for most companies. How can companies meet regulatory requirements around searchability, records retention, logging and other areas?

The real challenge as start-ups address the needs of enterprises is to maintain the core value that earned users in the first place. If they add every feature IT asks for, will the products lose their usability? If they make it easier to lock down access to the systems with two-factor logins when you can’t remember one factor, will users revolt? If these tools were used to get around IT, will the fact that they can now be monitored scare users away?

Time will tell. But this grand experiment would make the “Trading Places” brothers proud. And a lot more than $1 is at stake.

Nick Mehta is CEO of LiveOffice and has served in senior operating roles in the enterprise and consumer technology markets for much of his career. He spent more than five years at Symantec Corporation and Veritas Software Corporation (now Symantec), where he served as vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Vault information archiving and discovery software business.

“It is critical that we speak with one voice,” wrote Whitman in an internal email I obtained (below).

Thus, she has appointed longtime HP exec Lynn Anderson (pictured here) to “take on the role of acting Chief Communications Officer reporting directly to me,” according to the memo she sent to senior leaders at the company.

Not sure what “acting” means yet, but Anderson has gotten the job that was once that of former SAP exec Bill Wohl. He was put on “special assignment” late this summer, whatever that means, with his duties being taken up by Global Marketing EVP Marty Homlish.

Now Anderson is taking over, having helped during the Wohl transition. She previously headed up influencer relations for HP’s enterprise business.

And before that, she worked on a variety of marketing jobs for HP Canada. Anderson’s background is wonky, according to her company bio: “Before joining HP in 1983 as a systems engineer, Anderson was a programmer, analyst and operations manager for several IT departments.”

During the initial announcement of her new job running HP, Whitman relied on longtime comms adviser Henry Gomez. Gomez, who worked closely with her when Whitman was CEO of eBay and later on her unsuccessful run for California governor, has a consulting business and presumably did not want to work full time for HP.

Here’s the memo:

To: Senior Leaders
Subject: Acting Chief Communications Officer

As we continue to execute our strategy for HP, communications will be an extremely important function and it is critical that we speak with one voice.

I want to thank Marty Homlish, EVP Global Marketing who stepped in and provided leadership during a critical junction. Going forward, I have asked Lynn Anderson to take on the role of acting Chief Communications Officer reporting directly to me.

Please ensure that Lynn is brought into all communications activities.

Regards,

Meg

Dell shares are down by $1.59 to $14.21, representing a drop of more than nearly 10.2 percent as of 9:40 am San Francisco time, amid heavier than usual trading volume.

The company has been seeking to reduce its exposure to the more fickle markets for consumer PCs and other devices and investing more aggressively in building up its enterprise IT offerings, says Brent Bracelin, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, in a note to clients today. Dell’s exposure now accounts for less than 5 percent of operating profits, he wrote.

To that end, one small bright spot came in the enterprise business. While sales of notebooks fell short of expectations by $200 million, dropping to the lowest growth rate in almost two years, these results were offset in part, Bracelin says, by stronger growth in the server and storage business. This helped boost per-share earnings to 54 cents, which beat the consensus by five cents, despite the fact that sales fell short of expectations by $100 million. Dell also reduced its sales forecasts for the full year.

The shift toward the enterprise has helped Dell shares to rise by 17 percent so far this year, beating the Nasdaq, which has fallen about 5 percent. “Most of the gains can be attributed to four consecutive quarters of greater than 50 percent operating profit growth driven by an enterprise IT spending recovery that was accentuated by Dell’s transformation in adding higher-value enterprise products and services,” Bracelin wrote.

But all good things must come to an end. Contracting IT budgets and the larger economy are delivering a one-two punch to Dell’s prospects. Bracelin wrote that it could be a year before Dell’s growth starts to accelerate again.

While Dell’s per-share earnings were 54 cents, about five cents ahead of the consensus, sales were $15.66 billion, a full $100 million shy of what analysts expected. Worse, Dell said it expects revenue in the third quarter to be “roughly flat” relative to the second quarter, which it said would be consistent with typical seasonal patterns seen over the last two years.

There’s more: Dell slashed its sales growth outlook for the year. It said it now expects revenue to grow in a range of one to five percent, down from its previous range of five to nine percent.

CEO Michael Dell tried to reassure investors of an eventual turnaround in a statement: “We continue to see great momentum in the high-growth areas of our business, which is a direct reflection of the discipline and strong execution our global Dell team is applying to help solve real-world challenges for our customers. We’re creating efficiency across every step of the IT value chain and ultimately enabling all customers — from home users to large businesses and government organizations — to achieve the outcomes that matter most to them.”

It wasn’t enough to calm skittish investors: Dell shares initially fell as much as six percent on the news, and are as of 1:25 pm Pacific Time trading down 4.2 percent, or 64 cents.

• Overall sales at $26.7 billion were $1 billion higher than the consensus and grew 12 percent.

• Profits were $3.7 billion or $3.09 per share, up eight percent year over year.
• Mainframe revenue grew 61 percent, including an 86 percent growth rate in the MIPS business and 12 percent growth in the Power Architecture business.
• Hardware added three percentage points of market share. Here IBM takes a swipe at Oracle, saying that 60 percent of 250 competitive displacements — cases where IBM sells gear that replaces another vendor’s — came in places where old Sun Microsystems machines had been running. This confirms something that Chris Whitmore of Deutsche Bank mentioned in a research note to clients this morning. Expect Oracle to retort sometime soon.
• Software sales grew 17 percent, or 10 percent after adjusting for currency.
• Services revenue grew 10 percent, or two percent after adjusting for the effect of currency. The services backlog — which measures the current value of contracted work underway that will be recognized as revenue in the future — grew to $144 billion, up by $15 billion, or $2 billion after adjusting for currency.
• Gross margin, a key measure of profitability, was 46.4 percent, up from 45.6 percent a year ago.
• IBM got a big boost from foreign currencies which are currently strong against the U.S. dollar, making sales outside the U.S. more profitable than within. Sales in the Americas grew 10 percent while combined sales in Europe, the Middle East and Africa rose 16 percent and Asia sales grew 14 percent; though after adjusting for currency, sales in both of those regions grew only three percent. Overall, revenue got a seven percent boost from benefits from foreign currencies.
• Sales in the BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China — increased 27 percent, or 21 percent after adjusting for currency.
• Sales in the U.S. were up six percent and in Canada up 11 percent.
• Another dig at Oracle came during the conference call, when CFO Mark Loughridge said that Netezza, the storage concern it bought last year for $1.7 billion, is winning business versus Oracle’s Exadata. Hardware was the one notable weakness in Oracle’s results when it last reported in June. Loughridge crowed that Netezza has an 80 percent win rate against competing hardware.

Analysts polled by Thomson Financial expect IBM to report sales of $25.35 billion and a per-share profit of $3.03. Analyst Chris Whitmore of Deutsche Bank Securities says, in a note to clients today, that he expects sales that are slightly above the consensus at $25.9 billion, which would amount to growth of more than nine percent over the year-ago quarter, and earnings of $3.01 or slightly below.

Whitmore says that checks of IBM’s sales and distribution channels indicate that demand remains strong for IBM’s mainframe systems as well as servers running its Power Architecture chip, and he says it’s taking meaningful share away from Oracle’s UltraSparc business, the line of servers Oracle absorbed when it acquired Sun Microsystems last year.

The service business should turn in a beefy quarter on the heels of new contract wins. Expect service revenue to come in line with previous forecasts of $12 to $13 billion, Whitmore says, with help from a favorable environment for foreign currencies.

That’s not to say there aren’t worries: Whitmore points out that IBM announced only five deals during the quarter, which is half as many as in the year-ago quarter. It’s also been disclosing less information about each deal, and only one — with India Infoline — was north of $50 million. “IBM’s services bookings figure is the biggest wild card this quarter due to the limited data,” he writes. Still, he expects it to track in line with prior forecasts, mainly because several five- and 10-year deals have been announced, even though their size hasn’t been disclosed.

We suspect consensus bookings expectation is $12B to $13B for the June Q and believe IBM is tracking in line with this estimate with solid long-term signings, as several multi-year deals (five and 10 years) were announced (although not sized).

Even so, Whitmore expects no change to IBM’s confident prediction that it will deliver $20 per share of earnings in 2015, and that implies annual growth of between 11 and 12 percent, which for now doesn’t seem unreasonable. As usual, all eyes will be looking for any hint that Big Blue is throttling back on its shorter-term guidance.

IBM has been a fairly solid performer this year, having seen its share price increase by more than 19 percent since the start of the year, beating both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Standard & Poor’s 500. Its shares closed Friday at $175.54, up $1.31, but were trading lower in premarket action this morning. We’ll see how it all turns out later in the day. See you then.

That might seem a piddling increase, but it’s actually quite substantial–the difference between $3.4 trillion and $3.6 trillion. Said Gartner’s Richard Gordon, “Absent the addition of media tablets, the forecast would have slightly declined in constant-dollar terms; however, with their addition, there’s virtually no change in the underlying forecast growth at the level of overall IT.”

Gartner also raised its 2011 IT hardware spending estimates, lifting them to 9.5 percent from 7.5 percent. And once again, tablets were largely the reason. Global spending on the devices is expected to reach $29.4 billion this year, up from $9.6 billion last year. And that growth trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Gartner expects the tablet market to have an average growth rate of 52 percent through 2015.

Analysts are feeling generally positive about HP’s prospects. IT spending has continued to recover, and Chris Whitmore, an analyst with Deutsche Bank, said he expects sales of servers, corporate PCs and software at HP should offset relatively weaker results in the printing and consumer PC business. The consensus estimate calls for HP to report per-share earnings of $1.29 on sales of $32.95 billion.

But unless they are disappointing in some way, the results will take a back seat to what details, if any, emerge about the vision Apotheker is laying out for the future of HP. Last month, HP shook up its board of directors in apparent hope of exorcising lingering demons after the surprise resignation of former CEO Mark Hurd in August.

There have been hints that HP will focus anew on software, yet those hints are coming amid a renewed push in the tablet business. Then again, Apotheker is probably saving up his plans for March 14, when HP holds a big event in Palo Alto for the press and media. That of course won’t stop the tea-leaf reading that’s been under way about HP for some time.

Now, it is targeting people many have never heard of on its home turf.

The company, part of India’s flagship conglomerate, the Tata Group, has launched a new business unit called iON—for information technology services that are available all the time. It offers services aimed at India’s small and medium-sized businesses, a sector traditionally overlooked by outsourcers that have focused on winning large accounts from major companies in the West.

The new campaign is based on cloud computing–meaning that small companies can download software that allows them to effectively manage their data and other computing needs from a remote server run by Tata Consultancy. Most clients will pay Tata Consultancy on a per-user basis, and, in some cases, with a portion of their revenues.

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Dell just reported quarterly earnings, and the numbers are a bit mixed. First off, sales in the fourth quarter were $15.692 billion, just a whisker short of consensus analyst expectations of $15.72 billion. That represents a 5 percent improvement over a year ago.

Per-share earnings, however, were way ahead of the consensus at 53 cents versus 37 cents, amounting to a change of 89 percent over the year-ago quarter.

In its outlook, Dell said it expects revenue to to grow in the range of 5 to 9 percent in its fiscal year 2012 (underway as of Jan. 29), and for profits to grow in a range of 6 to 12 percent. Cash flow from operations will exceed profits.

Dell shares are up more than 6 percent in after-hours trading.

Here are some highlights:

• Enterprise sales and services grew 7 percent to $4.6 billion, or 29 percent of overall sales.
• Server revenue increased 16 percent.
• EqualLogic sales grew 49 percent and, combined with Dell PowerVault sales, accounted for almost two-thirds of storage sales and north of 80 percent of storage gross margin dollars.
• Sales in the combined large enterprise, the public and small- to medium-business sector was up 9 percent to $12.4 billion in the quarter, with revenue for commercial laptop and desktop computers growing 10 percent.
• PC profitability (Dell calls them clients) improved in the second half of the year, driven by improvements in the supply chain, lower input costs and improved product quality. For the full year, PC revenue grew 14 percent to $33.7 billion, driven on a refresh cycle from corporate buyers.

CEO Michael Dell sounded an optimistic note, the first I can recall in some time:

“I’m very pleased with our fiscal year results and the strong performance we’re seeing in our commercial businesses. We remain focused on developing and acquiring new technologies and capabilities, and our IT solutions portfolio has never been stronger. Customers are now seeing Dell in a fresh light, and we’re heading into the new year with strength and optimism.”

“We haven’t pushed it real hard in business, and it’s being grabbed out of our hands,” Steve Jobs said last year. “And I talk to people everyday in all kinds of businesses that are using iPads, all the way from boards of directors that are shipping iPads around instead of board books, down to nurses and doctors in hospitals and other large and small businesses.”

If Apple’s not pushing the iPad into the enterprise market, how is it getting there? Carried in by the rank and file–just as smartphones were. Employees are buying iPads, and other mobile devices as well, and enterprise is increasingly supporting them on the back end and sometimes even subsidizing them, or their use.

In other words, the consumer market has evolved into a de facto evangelist for Apple in enterprise, a lucky development for the company, which is uniquely positioned to benefit from it.

“This trend should mean that the key to corporate success over the long term is being strong in consumer devices that you use everyday,” says Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes. “As a result, the purchase pattern is shifting toward laptops, tablets and smart phones being bought by consumers (all key areas of Apple’s strength), while direct sales of corporate products have shorter and smaller upgrade cycles. We call this trend the “Consumerization of IT,” which benefits companies with strong consumer appeal and customer service reputations….We believe Apple has a large lead in terms of driving this trend, while it presents challenges for traditional PC vendors, in our opinion. We believe the iPad’s success in the enterprise will help Apple make further inroads into the corporate market with other products eventually.”

Interesting, this vision of the iPad as Apple’s Trojan Horse for enterprise, particularly since it appears to be a natural evolution of the consumer market. And if it accelerates corporate adoption of the device as well as other Apple hardware over the long term–well then, it truly is magical and revolutionary.

Spiceworks has. Over four years, the company has evolved from an an ad-supported network mapping tool to something of a Facebook for IT pros. The social networking part happened more or less by accident. Now Spiceworks, based in Austin, Texas, has a community 1.3 million strong, and adding more than 2,000 new members a day, all of them making technology spending decisions for their small to mid-sized companies. Tech advertisers and vendors are naturally lining up to get in.

And so have the venture capitalists. Last year, Spiceworks landed a $16 million C round led by Institutional Venture Partners, known for funding Twitter and Zynga and Netflix. Other investors include Austin Ventures and Shasta Ventures with total funding at $27 million.

Spiceworks co-founder Jay Hallberg was in New York stopped by our offices in New York and we talked about how Spiceworks got started, where it’s going, and why you may hear IT pros asking each other about their “pepper level.”

NewEnterprise: So Spiceworks has been described to me as a sort of Facebook for the IT professional. How did you get to that point?

Jay Hallberg: When we started we had no idea that was what it was going to become. When we launched in early 2006 the idea was to build an application that would let IT professionals manage their networks. In small and medium companies there’s usually one or two guys managing all the IT issues. It was a free download, ad-supported, and it could catalog everything on a local network, anything with an IP address, PCs printers, storage, servers. The idea was that it was going to be ad supported. It turned out to be a wild success. They started downloading it like mad, and they started telling each other about it. Then they started asking each other questions and comparing notes in the forum we had set up. That was really when the spark took off. It was a lot more than a network application, it was a social application. We’re now adding about 2,000 users a day and to put this in some perspective, there are about 5 million IT pros in the world taking care of the needs of some 200 million employees. We have about a quarter of them in Spiceworks, about 1.3 million. Vendors started approaching us so they could set up pages where they could engage these people where they work, and it was natural to take another step and start selling the product.

But it’s still very much a management tool too?

Yes. We tend to think of it as three things. There’s applications, and so we build out just like Facebook has messaging and photos we build things the IT manager needs to get their job done. A help desk, inventory, monitoring, network maps. Secondly we have the community functionality. And finally we have vendors selling products directly within Spiceworks. The easy example is with printers. The Spiceworks app shows you what printers you have and the status of their ink cartridges. If you know the printer ink status why wouldn’t you help them order the ink when it needs to be replaced? Then you can start crowdsourcing information to compare what you spend on ink versus other companies.

And so far you target mainly people in mid-sized and smaller companies. Why not the bigger ones?

It’s used in some enterprises. But our view is that there are about 15,000 companies with more than 1,000 employees. The people who work at those bigger companies get personal attention from the big IT vendors like CA Technologies, and BMC and IBM. But what about the millions of businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees that don’t get that kind of infrastructure and attention from the big vendors? So we started advertising to those people, and then the vendors came to us and said they wanted to build features into Spiceworks. EMC will build a storage advisor. Intel has paid to build a tool to manage their chips better. Because of the reach we have, now these companies want to take their relationship with us all the way through to purchasing. One thing we’re just rolling out is that we’ll take credit cards, but we’re also creating a request-for-quote feature. So when a user says he needs to buy a few servers he can send that to several vendors. And then he can talk it over with his friends in the community and see if he’s getting a good deal.

You’re growing awfully fast. How do expect to maintain that pace? You’re getting fairly close to penetrating about half of your addressable market.

One reason we’re excited as that we certainly see getting to that 50 percent market because we’re starting to see a tipping point where one IT pro goes to another job and when he starts he looks around says ‘You’re not on Spiceworks?’ and soon everyone at his new job has joined too. For them their pepper level starting to become part of their professional identity.

What’s a pepper level?

So when you join you’re a pinmento. And then you move up as your stature grows to habanero and jalapeno. The highest level is pure Capsaicin, which is the molecule itself. There’s about 25 ways to get points. It’s primarily about making the best contributions, the best answers, helping other people solve problems. It turns IT into a bit of a game.

It was a complaint that Sunny Gupta heard often around the time that the company he was working for, Opsware, was being acquired by Hewlett-Packard. “CIOs kept pulling me aside and telling me their jobs were changing,” he said. “A job that used to be about managing technology was quickly becoming one of managing costs.”

It was a rare opportunity to launch a service that numerous big companies were clamoring for. His response is Apptio, a cloud-based service that tracks IT costs and other metrics for CIOs who are constantly under pressure to justify their budgets to CEOs. Backed by $41 million in venture capital funding from Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Shasta Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz–the venture firm run buy Gupta’s former Opsware colleagues Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It’s growing like crazy, and customers include Cisco Systems, Starbucks, Facebook and J.P. Morgan Chase. Cisco liked it so much it joined with the venture firms in a $16.5 $20 million Series C round of funding that closed last November, and it also resells Apptio to its customers.

I caught up with Gupta by phone while he was on a trip to London to talk about Apptio’s business and how it’s shaping up.

NewEnterprise: Sunny, let’s start at the top. What does Apptio do?

Sunny Gupta: IT has a lot of raw materials like labor, hardware and software. A lot of these things are tracked at the company level. But the CIO’s job is managing the IT products. We aim to help the CIO really understand the cost structure of all their IT assets. We do this by producing what we call a Bill of IT. It captures the supply and demand of IT resources to the business. It helps the CIO show what the levels of demand and spending really are. We also help them with planning and budgeting and forecasting. And then we help them make cost-reduction decisions and benchmark their performance against other companies in their industry.

How many customers do you have?

We have about 60 customers, and we are managing more than $50 billion in IT spending.

So every company does a return-on-investment analysis on its IT spending. This sounds like it’s a lot more detailed than that.

You can think about it as a detailed ROI, but the way our customers think about it is as an ongoing management system that tracks the fully loaded cost structure of the products and services they provide to their businesses on a month-to-month basis. It tracks costs, but also utilization, so you can see how the resources are being used, and whether or not it makes sense to, say, consolidate a data center.

You said Facebook is a customer. Can you tell me a little about how it’s used there?

The CIO there uses Apptio to track monthly telecom expenses, and to help understand costs and to make decisions around getting the most out of what they spend.

A lot of companies are struggling with decisions about moving their IT to the cloud or keeping it on-premise, or some mix of the two. How does Apptio fit in a situation like that?

We’re seeing a lot of hybrids. At the large companies, the biggest portion of their costs are still in-house. Without naming names, some of our largest customers have 50,000 or 100,000 servers. These are systems that have been in use for a long time and they’re critical to the business. But we also see large enterprises adopting external cloud services. It may be Amazon Web Services or something from Rackspace, or they may be using a software-as-service like Salesforce.com. The trick is to get a handle on what the costs are and if you think it might be time to move something to an external provider so you can make an objective decision.

A lot of the time a CIO has to decide between something that’s really good and really expensive or something that’s good enough and less expensive. Can you help in cases like that?

That’s one of our prime use cases. If you talk to Rebecca Jacoby, the CIO at Cisco, she says she’s stopped asking “Why not IT?” and started asking “Why IT?” If what you have is good enough based on the cost structure and utilization, you get the granular visibility into all those metrics so you can make decisions. For example, it may be that you don’t need as much storage as you think you do, and so the best move isn’t to switch to the cloud but to stop paying for some of the storage that you’re not using. For the first time, executives are able to make business decisions around technology based on true business metrics. We find on average that customers are able to save 5 to 6 percent of their spend, and over 12 to 18 months they can reduce it by 10 to 15 percent.

What’s involved? If it’s a cloud based service, I presume there’s nothing to install at the customer site.

It’s fully cloud-based, so there’s nothing to install. It takes the financial data from enterprise resource planning software, like SAP or Oracle, and it also takes IT operational data, support tickets and other data. It combines them with the financial data. Once you have all that data you can start working on what-if scenarios and make decisions about what to do–or not do–next. If you want to control or reduce costs, having that detailed visibility is the first step.

The headliner was VNXe, its first low-end offering, priced at less than $10,000 and aimed at small and medium businesses, a segment where Dell used to resell EMC equipment. In another bit of product-launch theater, EMC had a fourth-grade boy onstage to demonstrate that the box–which in this case was mounted on the back of another Mini Cooper–could be managed and configured from an iPad.

I caught up with EMC Chief Marketing Officer Jeremy Burton to talk about it and the 40 other products EMC launched yesterday.

NewEnterprise: So 41 products all at once?

Burton: I’ve never been in a situation where the release dates of so many products aligned. We realized we might as well do them all at the beginning of the year. Internally we called it the “mega-launch.”

What kind of opportunities do you see in that lower-end market. This was your first entry into that market.

We estimate maybe a $4 billion opportunity there. We don’t have much of it now, call it zero. We’ve never really built a product that’s tailor made for that market. And for a product like that, you can’t just build it–you have to build it in a way that the channel can make money on and create customer satisfaction. We’ve got several partners who will take this product to market. We’ve committed $20 million there to generate demand and bootstrap the whole thing.

Tell me about this go-to-market effort.

Traditionally EMC has been led by direct sales. We have a sales force and they call on the customer directly. With a products that sells for $9,000 or $10,000 you can’t afford to sell that in the same way. We have to create pull for the product with our partners. You have to get the customers calling to ask for the product. It’s a little bit of everything. There’s advertising, there’s direct campaigns. Anything to get the phones to ring. To get the reps at the events jazzed up we’ve leased a fleet of 21 Mini Coopers. We’ll be doing 108 partner events around the world.

So who do you see as a typical customer for this?

Before I worked for EMC I ran a software company that had about 700 or 800 people. We had about 20 guys in the IT department. We didn’t have a lot of specialists, we had a lot of generalists there. So I’d say any company that’s at less than $25 million in annual sales is a perfect candidate. They’re not going to have the high-end skills to deal with the complexity of the high-end arrays. But they’ll have VMWare, they’ll have exchange environments, they have file shares, and they’ll want to get going quickly.

It’s funny I should be talking to you today. I just published a Q&A with Ping Li of Accel Partners. We got to talking about the storage needs of companies moving to the cloud, particularly around their database environments, and he said the trend is toward running open-source things like Hadoop on commodity hardware. He said he’s not seeing a lot of EMC gear at Google or Facebook or many of the other Web companies. There’s a lot of people who are seeing both a trend and an opportunity around that. What do you see?

If you’re Google and you’ve got your own team of rocket scientists who can build your own file system and kernel and download modules from the Internet every day, you don’t need it. But if you’re Pfizer, you probably have a lot of rocket scientists, but you probably don’t want them working on reconfiguring kernels, you probably want them working on discovering new drugs. And so, picking the techiest of the tech companies and saying they don’t use our stuff, yeah those are companies with the smartest tech guys on the planet. The problem is they’re not in all the Fortune 500 companies in the world, and in fact I’d argue they’re in almost none of them.

So if you want to have that scaled-out commodity storage and you want to manage big data, and you don’t want to hire 1,000 rocket scientists to do it, we can sell it to you. It won’t be true commodity hardware, but then you won’t have to hire so many people to manage it. That to me is kind of the rub. EBay is a big name on the Web, and it uses our Object Storage infrastructure. Could they have built it themselves? Probably. But there’s a little intellectual snobbery inside these companies. They say, “We don’t want to buy your stuff because we’re smarter than you.” Those are the edge cases. If we just get the rest we’re happy.

Let’s talk about the broader picture in IT spending. What are you hearing from your largest customers about their intent to spend this year?

2010 was a decent year. Going into 2010 folks said they thought their spending would increase two to three percent. They probably ended up with three to four percent. Looking out into this year, people seem a little more optimistic. But even still I think it’s in the three to five percent range. One thing we saw in 2009 is that folks didn’t buy much storage capacity last year and instead tried to use what they had. Going into 2010 there were signs of recovery and people started to spend again, and we see that continuing into 2011. One reason for the Isilon acquisition is that we do see a trend toward spending into different areas of the business.

At another level I think I agree with you and with Ping that certain companies will move to Hadoop for a certain class of application and we’ve got a pretty strong relationship between our Greenplum division and Hadoop. What a lot of people want to do is analyze traditional enterprise data in conjunction with something else. What Greenplum has tried to do is bridge the gap between Hadoop and the more traditional storage infrastructure. Hadoop is not going away, and its something that we fully intend to work with.

I caught up with Li last week to talk about the way he sees the cloud shaping up in the enterprise, and where he’s seeing opportunity as it develops. If cloud computing turns out to be the fundamentally new computing platform that many think it is, then there’s a lot of different pieces–Li refers to these as layers–that have to be assembled to make it work. And it’s in those layers where he looks for opportunities.

NewEnterprise: So what do you mean when you talk about the “cloudframe”?

Li: “I keep telling everyone that every time there’s a new computing platform, you basically have to re-create all the pieces of the mainframe. The basic building blocks of computing don’t change. You still need provisioning, management, security, and you need networking. The pieces may change, and different layers get merged into others. I’ve been calling it the cloudframe, for lack of a better word, which allows you to redefine all the layers, from the data layer to the storage layer to the provisioning management layer. Some of the layers that may have been separate before are being merged into one. So I’m spending my time figuring which are the layers that you can build a company around and which are the ones that become features rather than products.

So what are you finding?

There are two layers I’ve spent a lot of time time on, and where we’ve made investments. One is the data layer, and one of the companies I’ve spent a lot of time on is Cloudera, which is built around the Hadoop ecosystem. With the new types of data and applications that are out there, it’s really challenging the idea about whether the relational database is the right data management solution of the future. If you look at the big Internet data centers, say at Google or Facebook, the answer is no. There are no Oracle databases running those applications. Instead they’re using things like Hadoop and MapReduce and distributed file systems on commodity hardware. So I think the whole data structure is moving because the types and volumes of data are changing so much. The data is a lot more complex, and there’s a lot more of it.

There’s been a lot of suspicion and resistance in the enterprise toward letting critical data and applications out the door to run on someone else’s hardware. Is that changing?

I’m less rigid with my definition of the cloud. It doesn’t have to all run on Amazon or something like that. This cloudframe idea is really about extracting applications and services from underlying hardware and resources. It’s about having things available to you anywhere, and having them scale up quickly. They can exist on both sides of the firewall. When we launched Cloudera we thought everyone was going to want to run things on Amazon’s cloud. But most enterprise customers are running large installations of Hadoop on their own servers.

So the data layer is clearly one place where you think businesses can be built. What are some of the others?

Once you have the data layer set, there will be a lot of innovation on the storage side. We’re doing a lot of things around flash memory storage. We’ve invested in Fusion-io, which uses flash memory to build high-performance storage systems. Before, you had to have a storage area network to get the performance and availability you needed to run a big database application. Adding flash memory to your storage lets you expand a lot and do it efficiently. If you look at a lot of the cloud data centers, there’s not a lot of EMC and NetApps gear running in them. There’s a lot of commodity white boxes with Fusion-io starting to get deployed in them.

Last year you joined the board of Nimbula after Accel made an investment in it. That must be part of another layer you like, right?

That’s the application layer. Nimbula is from the guys who first built Amazon EC2. Now they’re actually building a private version of EC2, for the enterprises who for one reason or another can’t go to the public cloud. If an IT manager wants to deploy an app these days they have to put in a request and then he may get servers in six months. With EC2, if you want to deploy something for testing or whatever, all you need is a credit card and you can get it going right away. The Nimbula guys are building a technology that provisions and manages cloud services out of your own IT resources. A lot of enterprise IT guys I talk to say their bosses point to Amazon EC2 and ask, “Why can’t you build me one of those?” Now they can.

All the layers are all getting reinvented. Some will be a service, some will be on-premise. For a new platform to emerge, a lot of things need to come together, and I think a lot of things have been in the making for a while. The environment feels as ripe as it ever has.

In particular, the company is already working to re-architect its core BlackBerry Enterprise Server product so that it can also be offered as a cloud-based service, to be hosted by either partners or RIM itself.

“We will be launching a cloud service,” RIM Vice President Pete Devenyi told Mobilized in an interview following a Boston event focused on RIM’s 2011 enterprise strategy.

However, Devenyi said the service offered by RIM directly won’t cover as many types of email servers as its software is capable of supporting, leaving room for partners.

“We’re not going to launch a cloud service for everything, for every combination,” he said. “There are going to be mail servers out there that we don’t connect with through our cloud service. There will be other partners that choose to connect to other mail server providers and they may offer a hosted service on their own.”

Partners could even offer a combination of both mail server and cloud-based mobile device management. The company didn’t say when any of the cloud services might launch.

Another area that the company is exploring is whether to expand its software to manage mobile devices from other makers.

“BlackBerry is and will continue to be dominant in most corporations,” Devenyi said. “It’s not going to be the only device, given the fact that consumers have the choice to bring in their own devices, and IT departments are often letting them in. So there’s a question there. Do those corporations have to manage those devices differently or is there the possibility that RIM might extend capabilities to make it easier for those corporations to manage those devices as well.”

That business would not be entirely new. The company started a program years ago called BlackBerry Connect that allowed businesses to use their BlackBerry servers to manage certain devices when those devices communicated using BlackBerry protocols. However, the new venture, if RIM decided to go ahead, would expand that to managing devices that use their own methods.

“In this case, it would have to be done differently because it would be more native,” he said. “It wouldn’t use BlackBerry protocols to manage those devices, but conceptually yes, we did that with BlackBerry Connect.”

Devenyi stressed that although the company is talking about the possibilities in this area, it has nothing to announce.

“It is not something that we would say is never going to happen,” he said. “If enough of our customers really want us to do it, we know that BlackBerry management is far and away the best management console in the world, and if the right thing to do is to extend a subset of those capabilities to be able to manage other devices, it’s worthy of a conversation.”

SecureWorks, which is privately held, says it has about 2,900 customers in 70 countries, and that its customers include 15 percent of the Fortune 500, as well as 1,500 banks and credit unions, though typical of a security company, it doesn’t name any of them. In 2009 it acquired the managed security business of VeriSign. It has about 700 employees and projected revenue of about $120 million.

It’s also known for its top-flight malware research team. Last year it was involved in the research and response around a banking Trojan called Origami, which originated in Russia and was designed to steal sign-in credentials.

Dell says the deal will expand its IT-as-service offerings. It also looks to be, at least in part, a reaction to Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of security firm ArcSight in October. No financial terms are being disclosed, but Dell had been involved in a reselling partnership with SecureWorks since July of last year. It’s also Dell’s second acquisition in as many months. On Dec. 13 it spent $820 million for the health IT company Compellent.