Dell this morning said it would invest $1 billion in expanding its solutions and services group especially in cloud and virtualization IT.

Steve Schuckenbrock, President of Dell Services said that the $1 billion does not include M&A. Dell has made several acquisitions over the past year. It recently said it would consolidate its N. California acquisitions within a new Silicon Valley Research and Development Center.

Mr Schuckenbrock said that rapid adoption of cloud based IT services offered an opportunity to disrupt the current way IT is used by enterprises.

"With this transformational shift, businesses are gaining benefits in terms of speed to market and
organizational and compute flexibility, said Mr Schuckenbrock. "Dell has made and will continue to make significant investments to deliver technology that helps customers thrive in the Virtual Era."

The money will go to fund the building of data centers around the world. These will provide public and private cloud technologies for Dell's enterprise customers. It plans to complete 12 data centers by the end of this year and an additional 10 by the middle of 2012.

Dell is also investing in virtualization technologies. It is offering pre-packaged virtual servers in 100 and 200 sized virtual server systems. All the hardware and software has been pre-optimized and storage is included.

Additional info:

Dell Inside Enterprise IT Blog
Dell Services
Dell on Twitter
Dell Desktop Virtualization Solutions