HP

It’s a rivalry for the ages, with Dell and HP squaring up toe-to-toe in most major IT markets. It hurt when HP overtook Dell as PC market leader several years ago and it smarted when HP won 3Par, but the recent Compellent deal shows Dell will keep getting off the mat for another swing.

As Dell continues to build its enterprise data center business, SMB division, storage market and so-on, it will continue to run into the Big Blue elephant in the room.

Lenovo’s business-class notebooks have a long history of running interference on Dell’s PC business, even long before IBM spun off its PC division into Lenovo.

Yes, yes, EMC and Dell still remain friends and partners for the time being. But the timer is ticking on that relationship now that Dell’s making major forays into the storage market with some key acquisitions.

Dell may have Apple crushed numbers-wise, but that hasn’t stopped the company from running after Apple’s cool factor with its own brand of MP3 players, smartphones and tablets.

Acer took a bite out of Dell’s notebook performance with its netbooks over the last few years and it certainly didn’t make any friends in Round Rock when it purchased perennial Dell competitor Gateway in 2007.

This year Dell sued a number of Asian LCD vendors, including Toshiba and Hitatchi, for allegedly fixing prices of LCDs.

It may be old news, but Dell’s subsequent dumping of Ben Curtis-aka, the "Dude, you’re getting a Dell"-guy-after an arrest for marijuana couldn’t have endeared the company in his heart. Seems pretty cold, ‘specially considering he could have easily been just doing some research for his slacker character.