Michael Dell is set to win a bruising, yearlong battle for control of his company. His next task -- getting Dell Inc. growing again -- may be even tougher.

Mr. Dell's proposal to buy the computer company for nearly $25 billion is expected to win approval in a stockholder vote that ends Thursday, according to people familiar with the matter. Dell has said it expects to be a private company by the end of October.

So Dell, for the first time since it went public 25 years ago, will largely become a one-man show, just as it was when Mr. Dell started the company in his college dorm room in 1984. He is set to own about 75% of the company and remain CEO, while private-equity firm Silver Lake will be a minority owner.

Now, Dell's success and Mr. Dell's legacy hinge on whether he can recast the company into what the tech industry terms a 'solutions' provider, serving as a trusted technicaladviser to businesses and providing them with services and software -- not simply shipping them low-price PCs and servers.

Three specific areas are due for more attention, people familiar with Dell's strategy say.

One is security software, which corporations use to prevent unauthorized use of their computing networks or thefts of data. Another is tools to help companies take an analytical approach to business decisions, a software niche known by the term Big Data. The third area is a plan to offer 'IT in a box,' or all-in-one bundles of hardware and software that companies can cheaply and easily deploy.

Dell executives previously have singled out roughly $3.3 billion in potential cost cuts, but didn't specify in what areas.

A spokesman for the company declined to comment. Mr. Dell has declined interview requests while the buyout is pending. But he has continued to make the case that taking the company private is the best path.

'We need to transform, and we need to do it quickly,' he wrote in a July letter to Dell stockholders.

The company continues to churn out new hardware designs. At an Intel Corp. event on Wednesday, for example, a Dell executive gave a sneak preview of a new line of tablets it plans to formally unveil on Oct. 2.

Yet some former executives and people who work with the company are skeptical. They question the value of Dell's technology assets, its ability to keep pace with the problems facing its business customers and Mr. Dell's own grasp of the company's challenges.

The planned makeover comes as the PC market is contracting as spending shifts to tablets and smartphones. Moreover, new Asian competitors are winning sales among big website operators like Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. The company has managed to hang on to its market share in PCs and servers recently, but largely through price-cutting strategies that have hurt its profit margins.

At the same time, Dell's plan to become a broader provider to corporations faces tough competition from International Business Machines Corp., Cisco Systems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., while upstarts are attacking individual technology niches Dell is targeting.

'Dell is stuck,' said Matt McIlwain, a managing director with venture-capital firm Madrona Venture Group, which invests in emerging business-tech companies. 'They don't have the ear or the wallet of enterprises like H-P or IBM do, nor are they innovative enough to keep pace with emerging tech leaders like Amazon Web Services.'