Dell, the world's second-biggest maker of personal computers after Hewlett-Packard, says it wants to buy lean IT firms with business models similar to those of India's outsourcing pioneers.

Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell's large enterprise operations, said Dell was taking a different route from rivals HP and IBM by helping firms strip out costs, rather than selling them long consultancy and software contracts.

He said Dell admired companies such as Indian computer services firms who have branched out into managing customers' networks, after saturating much of the market for managing older business applications software.

They created remote infrastructure management, they created optimized labor pools in optimized locations, and they had consulting on the front end. You'll see us do the same things, he told Reuters in an interview.

The kinds of companies who have that as their DNA are much more attractive to us than the big traditional outsourcing companies, he said, adding such companies were also to be found in the United States and Europe.

We will continue to be acquisitive in consulting -- we've bought three or four small companies but we'd be thrilled to continue to pick up small and medium-sized companies in that space to extend our capacity, he said.

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