Michael Dell has grown tired of discussing his company’s reinvention.

He mocks suggestions that the company he founded is taking more risks than in the past and parries questions about how Dell’s culture had changed.

“It’s O.K. whether everyone doesn’t understand what we’re doing,” Dell said during an interview at Dell headquarters here, just north of Austin.

With its heralded direct-sales business model and cost-squeezing supply chain management no longer giving Dell the advantages they once did, Dell has had to cut more costs and experiment with retail sales. Now, it plans acquisitions to restore growth as it tries to catch up with its rivals in one of the most difficult economic times in its history.

“It appears they are boxed in on all sides,” said Ashok Kumar, an analyst with Collins Stewart. “I don’t know how they can possibly extricate themselves from the gap they are in.”

Dell will be fighting in a world that now favors well-rounded, more flexible companies. Hewlett-Packard, EMC, Cisco Systems and Oracle have spent the past several years bulking up through a steady stream of acquisitions.

HP, for example, has increased its annual revenue to a projected $130 billion for the coming year, from $45 billion in 2001. Oracle has doubled its annual revenue by a similar period to more than $22 billion. EMC traced 76 percent of its revenue to hardware in 2000, but it now derives 57 percent from software and services, thanks to acquisitions.

These companies, along with Sun Microsystems and worldly Business Machines, have scooped up many of the prized assets that either survived or thrived in the era after the dot-com bust, fattening their software and services arsenals.

Dell’s growth, to revenue of $56 billion in 2006 from $5.3 billion in 1996, has come from within. But company executives now concede that they need to assemble a…

[Source] dhiram