The Dell (DELL) founder told BusinessWeek in an interview that growth rates for July through December could match or exceed growth in the company's fiscal first quarter, which ended on May 2. Consumer business sales for the quarter rose 20% and unit growth hit 47%, outpacing the rest of the PC industry. "We've kind of reignited the thing," says Dell. "You'll see the growth rate be every bit of that in the second half of the year, if not more We're going to have a big second half."

Before Dell reclaimed the reins as CEO a year and a half ago, the PC maker suffered nearly two years of declining market share, falling profits, and slower growth. Although the executive, who founded the company in 1984, has made strides toward a turnaround, results in recent quarters have been choppy. Expectations that the rough patch may be ending resurfaced in May, however, when Dell said first-quarter profit rose nearly 4%, and sales climbed 9% [BusinessWeek.com, 5/29/08], to $16.08 billion. Dell has cut jobs, redesigned products to capture share in the fast-growing consumer market, and moved computers onto the shelves of 13,000 retail stores, lessening dependence on a long-standing direct-sales approach.

Beyond Commodity PCs Now the company is looking for new ways to expand beyond selling commodity PCs, notebooks, and servers. It's stepped up the pace of acquisitions, making eight since 2007, compared with half that in the company's first 22 years. Its founder says Dell also is gearing up to expand its services business. And PCs are selling overseas at a blistering pace: First-quarter revenue in Brazil, Russia, India, and China combined grew 58%, and sales in a basket of 14 emerging markets now account for 12% of the total.

The company also is creating a new "cloud computing" business to customize large orders of thousands of servers for customers like Facebook, Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon.com (AMZN), and Yahoo (YHOO). Now generating "hundreds of millions" of dollars in sales, cloud computing could be a $1 billion business "in a couple years," Dell says.

"All those Superpokes -- that's a lot of servers," Dell says, referring to some of the more lighthearted Facebook features. "Throwing sheep -- you need a lot of servers."

Thinner Laptops In the all-important notebook market, a new line called the E-series due in mid-August will address the trend toward thinner, lighter machines. Dell has benefited as businesses have switched from buying desktops to laptops, since companies have shed off-brand PC suppliers and consolidated orders with Dell or Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), says Avi Cohen, head of research at Avian Securities. "The biggest driver for Dell, outside of macroeconomic conditions, has been the transition from desktops to notebooks," he says.

Dell's stock has been recovering, too. It's risen 23% over the past three months, compared with an 8% decline in archrival HP and a 10% drop in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index. Dell has given up some gains in recent days amid mixed news about tech sector earnings. Apple (AAPL) shares fell after the company on July 22 forecast thinner profit margins [BusinessWeek.com, 7/22/08] in coming quarters. A few days earlier, Microsoft (MSFT) stock took a hit when its earnings for the June quarter missed Wall Street's expectations and the software giant reduced its profit forecast for the fiscal year that began on July 1.