Dell Technologies has had two record quarters in India in 2021 with the market being among the top five for the company globally, according to Alok Ohrie, President and Managing Director, Dell Technologies India.

BusinessLine spoke to Ohrie regarding the company’s growth in India and globally, the future of the IT industry in India moving forward, its focus on technologies such as 5G, and its priorities for H2 FY22 and beyond. Excerpts:

In 2019 India was the second-fastest growing country for Dell globally. Has this momentum continued since then?

We don’t break our numbers by region but I can tell you that we are doing exceedingly well.

Dell Technologies India, being a microcosm of Dell Technologies globally, is in many ways mirroring the same level of performance and excitement. India has had two record quarters this year. Q1 for us was a record quarter. In Q2, we did better than Q1 from revenue and overall financial metrics perspective. We are now amongst the top five markets for Dell Technologies globally and among the top two in Asia-Pacific and Japan.

Our market share in India with regards to storage is number one. In the clients business, which is desktops, laptops, etc, we are at number two but are very close to number one and have gained a significant amount of market share in the first half from a year-on-year perspective. We also have a huge presence of our global functions in India, almost every other global function is represented. And today, India happens to be the second-largest site outside of the US from an employee base perspective.

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technology over the past 12-18 months. Is this sustainable growth going forward?

IT as a big area of focus started in India a little ahead of Covid.

Covid has accelerated the pace of adoption and has also brought many folks who were sitting on the fence to jump onto the other side of wanting to adopt IT. Overall, the country has made good progress with regard to the adoption of IT. But this has been accelerated and it’ll continue to remain at that pace because there is no going back.

Our country is a consumption-oriented economy. It is definitely going to hold the growth that one has seen in the IT industry. The IT industry typically sees growth at a couple of 100 basis points higher than the GDP growth. The GDP growth forecast for India is now climbing up to 9.5 per cent. If that happens, the IT industry will be growing faster than that. So there is going to be demand for those products and technologies in the market.

Also see: India server market logs $289.5 mn revenue in Q2 2021: IDC

The third point is that excitement levels amongst global investors have gone up for India. This investment also goes into start-ups — new businesses that are being created from scratch. It’s a self-feeding cycle. Because of these start-ups, there’s more employability, more diversity and there is more economic activity that is coming in. Because of economic activity, GDP will continue to grow.

I’m no good at crystal gazing, but the indicators are there that the growth in the IT industry will continue to be strong. Professional services in India as an industry has been the biggest beneficiary of the last two years of disruption, of the pandemic. More IT service work is being subcontracted to Indian firms. It’s all interlinked.

Can you provide a roadmap on the PLI scheme?

We have our own manufacturing facility here. We are working very closely with the government to look at how we can continue to contribute to Make in India. Our manufacturing plant has existed since 2007. We are the only OEM manufacturer that has applied for the PLI and been approved.

From our perspective, our interest in applying for PLI production link is to further enhance our capability in India to serve Indian customers. And we are quite confident that for a couple of years — it’s a four-year-long scheme — for a couple of years we will be very busy serving the customers of India.

Has there been any change in your go-to-market strategy given that new tech areas may need a different kind of approach?

What has changed is that we have brought in a humongous amount of focus on accounts that have potential from an infrastructure point of view — as in technology and data centre products — and a desire to move on to a multi-cloud environment.

These are bigger customers and the biggest challenge for them is to be able to assess what workloads should be maintained on-premises, what workloads should go on to a public cloud, what should be the strategy when it comes to co-location etc. So we have created a team that is called the enterprise team. The allocation of resources from specialist organisations of ours is far higher in this segment. These are solution architects who work with our customers, literally for one-to-one mapping involving richer resource deployment.

Also see: Global PC shipments inch up in Q3 2021: Gartner

And then we have created a second batch of accounts that we call corporate segment that we differentiate from the big market.

We have now got four clear segments on the B2B side — enterprise, corporate, mid-market and government. The government segment is separate. It is a very different flavour — lead times are different from the start to close of an opportunity and the cycles are very different.

Dell sees 5G as a big opportunity. Have you started any trials with Indian telcos on this front?

We are working very closely with telecom service providers on 5G. We are working very closely with the network and the teams of the three big names in the telecom service provider space. There are a lot of use cases that are being tested at this moment.

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