The Marketing Explorer

With news the this morning that Dell’s board has agreed to a buyout that will make the company private again, the speculation about how the company will capitalize on its newfound freedom can officially begin. Divesting its flailing consumer PC business seems like a wise decision — if not a foregone conclusion — but I think Dell also needs to make some investments in order to really position itself as a leader in the enterprise IT space.

Some of these suggestions are bold, but it’s hard to see how Dell can continue to compete against IBM (s ibm), HP (s hpq) and Cisco (s csco) on one end and cloud services on the other without taking some risks. I actually think Dell is well positioned to be a big part of the future of IT if it just embraces a future that’s all about software and next-generation applications. Hardware…