Dell is in the midst of a turnaround effort to make more money from higher-margin products such as software and services, and those products are often sold hand in hand with data center equipment, making Dell's enterprise products business important.

As part of the effort, Dell has been buying up software companies such as SonicWall, AppAssure, Scalent and, most recently, Quest Software, which at $2.6 billion will be one of its biggest acquisitions to date. It hopes to with its enterprise hardware to expand its sales.

Revenue for the quarter just ended was below what financial analysts had been expecting, according to a consensus estimate from Thomson Financial. Its earnings before one-time items beat the forecast, however, coming in at $0.50, compared with the analyst forecast of $0.45.

Dell's shares on the Nasdaq ended the trading day at $12.34, down 1.75 percent. In trading after hours they slipped a further 2.7 percent to $12.00 at the time of this report.