Technology companies like Dell are witnessing increased adoption of their IT products and services as enterprises’ reliance on digital tools becomes essential. BusinessLine spoke with Amit Midha – President, Asia Pacific & Japan and Global Digital Cities, Dell Technologies, on how the company is charting out its growth strategy and the opportunity in India.

FY20 was a good year for Dell. How do you see the change given the overall impact of pandemic, uncertainty and global economic slowdown?

Dell Technologies is showing great resilience with business model, products and services being provided to customers and partners. We have always believed, a significant part of our business to be under essential services. The current situation is advocate of how essential technology is in today’s context for someone who is doing remote education or someone who is working remotely and running factories. I think the sooner we adopt the technology infrastructure and move forward the better normalcy can come in. Our subscription services are growing much faster, deferred revenue is increasing and SaaS business within VMware is growing much faster than what our businesses were.

Will the pace of adoption of tech sustain going forward, in terms of investments?

Initially, first phase was when companies just needed to get a device in the hands of their team members. Now, customers are looking to become digital in every operation that they do. Then the next wave will be, extracting insights from the data collected, if we use it to change customer experience or implement new business model. And beyond that it will be next set of technologies. What we are starting to see is that people are putting the pandemic behind them and they are saying okay, something else could happen tomorrow.

Also read: Dell focussing on ‘future-ready commercial PCs’

How do I make sure I am resilient in that time? So resiliency is the next piece. So first thing is just keep the lights on. Second stage is the resiliency which is what the digital workplace piece comes in. Third phase is AI and putting data to use, and fourth one is leapfrogging, which is about how do I use new technologies.

What technologies will Dell focus on at the fourth stage of this evolution?

We are quite excited about six technologies. 5G is the bedrock for everything to come from this point onwards. Then on top of that now you have edge computing that comes on with that. Cyber security has become very important, then there is multi-cloud and finally the AI/ML becomes very important. So those are the six areas we are going to invest across the globe, and you will see us not only investing in these areas, but also bringing more products that are well-proven to the market place, including India.

What is the role that Dell foresees in 5G area?

5G is quite an interesting space because so far telecom was largely depending on one company to secure financing, getting licensing, and getting one of the core equipment provider like Erricson, Nokia, Samsung or Huawei to build out network. Now think about autonomous cars, think about the healthcare machines inside the hospitals, or think about a critical equipment in an oil rig running offshore. Any of those applications that will be 5G enabled, are the ones where the latency matters and that is where the monetisation for telcos can come in.

Also read: How digital business will evolve in 2021

Second, consumption is going to go up exponentially from a data perspective. And the way you build this is, instead of thinking of a dedicated telco cloud, you are basically building an IT cloud, and using that to provide voice and other applications on top. And that is exactly what we have been doing. So I think the whole mind set has to be, instead of a dedicated costly equipment for 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, and then laying an application layer on top, the whole business model for telco is changing. 5G could be a complete game changer for everything we do and how we conduct business.

What is the next big milestone for you in terms of revenue in India?

We are pretty pleased with our performance in India and we are going to continue to grow faster than market and gain share. But more importantly, we’ve got to bring the innovation to the market, both as a service, as a SaaS, but also the six areas of investment we are making which is more ground breaking and leapfrogging for our customers and for us as well.

What kind of opportunities is Dell looking at from a start-up perspective?

We are very open to investing and growing our technology partnerships with the growing companies. We are looking for companies with a global mindset and solving a new set of problems using new technology platforms. We have seen lots of that come out of Israel. They are building global companies and now we have acquired several of them. And I think India could be next.

Dell has announced Moonshot goals by 2030. How is India contributing towards it?

India is like a mini headquarter for us. This is where everything happens. Lot of great ideas come out of here. If I want to know what is going on in the company, I call my India team and they tell me everything going on around the world. They know it faster than anywhere else.

This is the second highest place of employment for us around the world. And I think it is going to continue to play bigger and bigger in the world. India will continue to outpace many of the markets we see across the world.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW