Dell Technologies sounded a cautious tone in releasing its latest earnings, noting that while results were relatively flat year over year, it was in a good position to ride out the current coronavirus uncertainty.

The vendor’s top line revenue results for its first fiscal quarter of 2021, which ended May 1, were indeed relatively stable compared to the previous year’s results at $21.9 billion. However, some income tax-related numbers did slash its net income in half to just $143 million for the latest quarter.

Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) reported an 8% year-over-year drop in revenues to $7.6 billion for its first fiscal quarter of 2021. The server and networking aspect of that group were the hardest hit, dropping 10% year over year, while its storage business witnessed a more modest 5% decline.

(The big bright spot for Dell during the quarter was its VMware business, which reported results that exceeded expectations.)

Dell COO Jeff Clarke explained that a shift in customer operations toward more work-at-home services impacted infrastructure spending during the quarter.

Dell CFO Tom Sweet added that the company did see double-digit demand growth for its VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and PowerMax storage platform “and solid demand in unstructured storage, offset by softness in other areas of core storage.” He also noted that the company witnessed improved order results for mainstream servers and “expects to gain share in this category.”

Dell earlier this month bolstered its storage portfolio with its PowerStore product that sits between PowerMax for high-end storage and PowerVault for entry-level storage. And it updated its Dell Technologies Cloud platform with a news storage partnership with Google Cloud, support for VMware’s Kubernetes products, and new hardware and software features for its VMware-based SD-WAN appliances.

Despite the bullishness on the new products, Dell’s management remained tight-lipped on providing much color about the current quarter.

“We did see overall weakness or softness in ISG more than we would have anticipated coming into the quarter,” Clarke said, adding optimistically that the company is “uniquely positioned to win in this evolving backdrop, and our Q1 performance again highlights our differentiation and the resiliency.”

Both executives repeatedly pushed back against providing much depth on their expectations for the current quarter. “I'm not going to get into specifics on how we see Q2 other than to tell you that we do expect it to be a little bit softer than historical norms,” Sweet explained.

Dell also notably did not announce any drastic operating cuts tied to the ongoing economic uncertainty. IBM, for instance, recently moved to slash thousands of jobs tied to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. And Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) said that all employees and board members were taking a pay cut following the company’s dismal second-quarter 2020 earnings that were hit hard by the global pandemic.

Clarke did spell out a three-phase process that Dell expects the world to work through in light of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

He explained that the first phase, dubbed “rapid response,” was “largely behind us.” This phase includes a shift toward employees working from home, kids learning at home, and that Dell was seeing hopeful signs of coming out of this phase “including possible vaccines.”

Clarke touted the current phase as “the new normal,” which he described as society realizing that “work isn’t a destination, rather it’s something many of us can do from anywhere, anytime.” In dealing with this phase Dell is working on remotely solving customer issues and planning for “how do we plan for the future?”

That future Clarke labeled as “new opportunities” tied to high volumes of virtual and online businesses. He noted that an automated, intelligent, and secure supply chain was key to supporting this change and that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) would be core to “glean meaningful business insights from the vast amounts of data this digital existence will create.”

Dell last month announced it would provide $9 billion in special financing in a bid to jumpstart IT investment in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. The Payment Flexibility Program offers customers 0% interest financing with no down payment and up to 180-day deferrals on payments. Additionally, the company is offering short-term options to meet the needs of workers and students that have been forced to telecommute as a result of stay-at-home orders. This includes six to 12-month financing terms for laptops and desktops.