Dell makes a seamless switch to being a complete IT player

Dell India, which is transitioning from being a pure-play PC maker to providing complete IT solutions, has found immediate success.

It has recorded over 50 per cent year-on-year growth, which translates to 186 wins over the last 12 months.

The industry verticals that have driven revenue growth for Dell India and helped it register compounded annual growth rates twice the industry numbers are BFSI (Banking, Financial services and Insurance), manufacturing, education and IT/ITeS.

President and Managing Director of Dell India, Alok Ohrie, under whose leadership India has become the fastest growing market globally for the $62 billion Dell Inc, and the company’s third largest market after the US and China, is on a mission to further accelerate the company’s transition.

The transition was initiated globally by Founder-CEO Michael Dell a few years before the company went private, in order to shake off popular perception of Dell being a PC maker despite being in the server business for nearly as long. “The wins far exceeded what we had targeted to achieve. More important: the wins included solution stacks from across all four of Dell’s lines of business – Enterprise Solutions, Client Solutions, Software and Services,” Ohrie told BusinessLine at the fifth edition of the Dell Annual Analyst Conference (DAAC) India, that witnessed participation from 92 analysts in Bengaluru on Wednesday.

After successfully reaching the $2 billion milestone in annual revenue, Dell India is now aggressively pursuing a target of $3 billion, as set out for the team by its global leadership.  “We have three priority areas – to be a trusted advisor to customers on end-to-end solutions, continue to expand our market coverage, evolve capabilities and internal processes.”

The company has defined seven solution blueprints to cater to customer requirements in the areas of Unified Communications & Collaboration, High Performance Computing, Cloud, Virtualization, Analytics, Business Process and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. More recently, a Client Solutions Centre which is co-located with the R&D centre was set up for customer executive briefings, design workshops and creating proof of concepts for customers, making it easier for customers to engage and co-innovate with Dell’s R&D team.

Dell India has increased its sales workforce by 34 per cent. To enhance capabilities, Dell has put its team through 31 weeks of intensive training in a 1-year programme christened ‘License to Sell’ that includes training in soft skills, technology, customer domain knowledge and end-to-end solutions selling across the company’s four lines of business.   Single Sign-on, an after-sales service training programme has also been initiated, so when a complex solution is sold to a customer, the ongoing support for the solution becomes easy for the customer to access with a specialist who will serve as the single-point of contact.

The company bills customers in 1,100 of the 1,609 cities with a population of 50,000 people in its Consumer Business. Dell has a presence in 221 cities to augment its Commercial Business and plans to ramp up its exclusive store count from 600 last fiscal to 825 stores by end of FY16.

COMMENT NOW