"It's hard to believe that we're coming in advance (of) that 20th anniversary of my inauguration as president. I'm getting older," former US president Bill Clinton said last week in his speech at the second annual Dell World in Austin, Texas.

"When I became president, the average cell phone weighed five pounds. There were a grand total of 50 websites on the entire Internet… I sent a grand total of two e-mails when I was president," said Clinton, who had led the world's largest economy through its longest period of expansion during peacetime, pointing to dramatic advances in the tech world over the past two decades.

The technology sector at large has increasingly become part of modern life, especially with the advent of the mobile Internet era in the last few years that could have even the most stubborn Luddites turning their gaze to ever-present all-new gadgets and apps.

While such a change serves to make savvy businessmen all the more keen to leverage technology to scale their businesses, it also poses challenges for many veterans in the tech arena that have seen their traditional dominance in areas like computing shaken by a rising force of mobile innovation.

It would not be a surprise if these veterans undergo a transformation in preparation for the road ahead, given the astonishingly rapid technological advances that have been achieved even in the eyes of the former US president.

"Dell is a company very much on the move," said Michael Dell, founder and chief executive officer of Dell Inc, last week while delivering a keynote speech during the company's second annual event, which went from December 11 through December 13. He pointed to the fact that innovations in the cloud, bid data, social media, and security arenas have changed the model for how technology is being consumed and delivered.

Noting that such innovations have urged his company to go beyond products by integrating software and services, Dell pledged continued efforts in the traditional hardware manufacturer's post-PC transformation to become an "end-to-end solutions provider" that was launched in 2009.

Over the past four years, the company, based in Round Rock, Texas, has invested $10 billion in building its muscle in the area of IT solutions, and just last year, investment in the field hit nearly $5 billion, according to Dell, who founded the $60 billion business from his university dorm room at the age of 19 with only $1,000.

Pushing for transformation

Shifting its roadmap toward the higher-margin enterprise solutions market through mainly hefty injections into mergers and acquisitions, the traditional PC hardware vendor has been striving to convince the world of its powers outside of making computers, aiming to offset a PC industry malaise that continues to erode into its earnings and revenues.

In the fourth quarter of the fiscal year, which ended November 2, Dell posted a sharp decline of 47 percent in net income and an 11 percent drop in revenue compared to the previous year, marking the fourth consecutive quarter of decline in earnings for the company, as PC sales slump in the midst of a continued craze for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

"In the enterprise, the strategic areas we're focused on, they are growing…What's not growing is the PC business, and that's an industry-wide phenomenon. We think [earnings] will come back as the economy improves," Steve Felice, president and chief commercial officer of Dell, told the Global Times on the sidelines of the annual conference, fending off market skeptism over the firm's slowing momentum amid transition.

Dell is not alone in fighting a battle against the listless PC sector. Its larger rival Hewlett-Packard, the longtime top PC vendor, which in the third quarter of the year saw its crown snatched by Chinese homegrown PC maker Lenovo, according to research firm Gartner Inc, has also been struggling to defend itself in the mobile age. In the fiscal quarter that ended October 31, HP reported a fall of 6.7 percent in revenue, and $6.85 billion in quarterly net loss versus $239 million of profit during the same period a year earlier.

The California-based PC and printing giant is "at the beginning of a multi-year transformation," its CEO Meg Whitman was quoted as saying in February by The Wall Street Journal.

HP remains a hardware and infrastructure company at its core, according to Whitman, who noted, however, that the company will be best known for its strength in enterprise solution fields such as cloud computing, security and data management in the next two to three years.

Heading for a mixed environment

While both US-based PC giants swear a restructuring following the model that International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) adopted years ago, neither appear to be as resolute as IBM in the sense of bidding farewell to hardware manufacturing.

PC manufacturing remains a significant part of the tech world, according to Michael Dell, who hinges his company's future on end-to-end solutions that incorporate multiple hardware systems that include the company's newly launched Windows 8 tablets into an IT solution system.

"For the time being, we think PCs are inevitable for productivity and entertainment, extending to communications. Even with negative growth this year, the industry shipped nearly 355 million computers. That's a lot and that number will be growing," David Daoud, Framingham, Massachusetts-based research director of personal computing at market research firm IDC, told the Global Times.

But the PC is no longer the central device users are accustomed to, Daoud noted. "We have long anticipated the rise of a 'multi-device per user' environment, and we're now seeing that environment materialize," he said, pointing to the rise of tablets and smartphones.

The analyst also expressed concerns over resorting to the strategy of a full end-to-end portfolio position, given the proliferation of devices, services and solutions.

Such fears are hardly quashing industry revolutionaries' ambitions to stand out against the sluggish PC industry. However, as Sally Xiao, executive director of Dell's market division for the greater China region, said at the end of November in Beijing at a tech forum, "Dell is not IBM," and a broader product portfolio could actually help the company differentiate from others.

But for the large PC veterans, the likes of Dell and HP, with thousands of employees, channel partners, customers and complex organizations, "the transition will take some time to complete," IDC's Daoud remarked.

"Even HP's CEO made that public, but we have yet to see a compelling strategy, which is probably still in the offing."