Following its Quest acquisition (worth $2.4 billion) Dell counts the eggs all its newly bought chickens should start laying-- hoping it will start making over $2bn in have annual software sales soon. 

And that is before sales grow to the $5bn by 2016, at least according to company predictions. Not bad for what was once a mere PC maker. 

“You have this huge PC business,” Dell's software division president John Swainson said at a roundtable discussing the company's software ambitions. “To have an impact on Dell’s bottom line, you have to have a meaningful software business.”

The Dell software shopping list is fairly impressive-- worth over $5bn and totaling 8 companies, including Force10, Wyse, Make, Clerity, SonicWall and Quest.

It is a transformation similar to the one IBM went through-- only Dell wants to achieve "critical mass" by 2016. It took IBM 20 years to shift entirely from hardware to software. 

Will Dell achieve its $5bn goal? Either way it will be interesting to see Dell compete against the likes of BMC, Microsoft, HP and IBM. 

Go Dell Targeting $5bn in Software Sales, Swainson Says (Bloomberg)