Key takes from Dell 2Q12 earnings call are highlighted below. The company saw weaker demand environment related to the consumer and federal segments slowing down mid-qtr. Enterprise demand still holding up across servers, storage, services and corporate PC refresh. Gross margins continue to improve on more disciplined selling (i.e. reduction in unprofitable consumer lines) as well as sales of more Dell-owned IP. In storage, the swap out of EMC revenues continues along at a good clip and margins are improving in tandem, +800 basis points in the last 12 months. Dell expects to return to absolute growth in the storage business by Jan ’12 quarter. Compellent was strong in the quarter, although Equallogic saw some weakness due to supply chain issues (now resolved) and pause ahead of a recent hardware and software refresh. From a strategic initiatives standpoint the most relevant announcements in the quarter were the Force10 acquisition, as well as the availability of Cloudera and OpenStack solutions. More detailed notes from the call are below, or you can view the presentation here.