Dell has become the world’s fastest-growing integrated technology company.

The company became the top storage supplier in the first half of 2014, while maintaining its number two shared position in the global x86 server market.

Dell registered double-digit revenue growth year-over-year, and grew PC shipments by nearly 10% year over year in Q3.

As a private company, Dell has accelerated investments in research and development, the channel, the customer experience, and sales to deliver industry-leading growth and innovation. With the ability to pursue a long-term strategy with 100% customer focus, Dell increasingly stands alone as an integrated provider of the end-to-end solutions that matter most to customers.

“Today, Dell is the world’s fastest growing integrated IT company in the world. Our strategy is resonating with customers worldwide as they look for a stable, reliable end-to-end solutions provider to meet their business and IT needs,” says Michael Dell, chairman and CEO. “From the endpoint to the data centre to the cloud, customers and partners value the certainty, ease and predictability of working with Dell.”

Dell announced today its expansion plans to open a new solution centre in downtown Chicago, Illinois, in early calendar year 2015. With new centres in Dubai, UAE and Sao Paulo, Brazil already opened earlier in the year, the new Chicago investment will give the company a total of 15 centres worldwide for enterprise customers and partners to easily test and evaluate broader end-to-end solutions and services.

Since opening its first centre in Limerick, Ireland, in 2011, Dell has completed nearly 20 000 enterprise customer and partner engagements, influencing more than $4-billionin commercial sales. Each centre’s pace of business worldwide is accelerating; in the past 18 months alone, Dell’s solution centres have hosted more than 11 000 customer and partner engagements.

Customers using Dell’s solution centres range from large enterprise and public sector organisations, to small and midmarket companies as well as Dell’s channel partners.

The centres play a critical role in enabling customers and partners to explore, develop and test the solutions and technologies that best meet their unique IT requirements, helping them to drive improved business outcomes and competitive advantage.

A key capability that sets Dell apart is its dedicated network, which allows any centre in the world to connect with the others, giving customers and partners the true power of a global network to test their applications worldwide by leveraging Dell’s networked infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Dell Research has developed a proof-of-concept solution called High Velocity Cloud that can, according to Dell’s analysis, support all the mobile device traffic in a medium-size city, such as Austin, with only one quarter of a rack of Dell server and networking equipment.

The High Velocity Cloud optimises standard servers for high-performance packet processing, and enables a 20x improvement in the capability of virtualised standard servers to handle network-intensive functions.

With partners, Dell Research recently set a performance record by demonstrating that, with High Velocity Cloud, a virtualised standard Dell R920 server with standard network adapters and no special hardware can be the infrastructure for a system capable of supporting 214 Gb/s of bandwidth while still leaving 90% of the server CPU free for running network intensive workloads.

The magnitude of disruption and innovation High Velocity Cloud can bring is exponential. For example, a service that once might have taken six months to roll out could now be rolled out in minutes. This opens tremendous opportunities and will push organisations to completely rethink business models, resource allocations and product lines.

Dell Ventures’ investments will allow Dell to stay at the forefront of innovation for customers, and support the entrepreneurs who are helping shape the future of IT.

The company has announced investments in Invincea, Lastline, Formation Data Systems and Nexenta since the $300-million Strategic Innovation Venture Fund was launched last year.

The fund is targeted toward investments in early-to-growth-stage companies in emerging technology areas including storage, cloud computing, big data, next generation data centre, security and mobility.

Dell Ventures continues to work with our business units across Dell, pulling together nimble, high-impact, cross-functional teams in areas of strategic focus. These teams expand our bandwidth and ability to identify, invest in, partner with and contribute to the success of more entrepreneurs and start-ups with leading-edge emerging technology solutions.

Dell is bringing value to start-ups including technical and business counsel, access to brand, customers, channel and go-to-market partnerships, and OEM solutions.

“Dell is continuing to emphasise a customer promise to create the most secure and manageable IT solutions,” says Patrick Moorhead, founder, president and principal analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy.

“These areas are critical for any IT department, but so is the need to satisfy the end user. Dell has wrapped its core IT strengths with new thoughtfully designed and attractive products geared for enhanced productivity in a variety of customer use cases.”