Digital technologies will play an essential role in business continutiy: Dell India head

Preparing for the recovery and growth phase seems as important for Dell Technologies as engaging with partners and customers to understand their needs and challenges at this juncture.

The company is committed to ensuring that there is no disruption to serving its customers, society and employees to help them navigate through the present situation, Alok Ohrie, President and Managing Director of Dell Technologies India, said in an interaction with BusinessLine . Edited excerpts:

As a company, we’ve been helping customers, both from public and private sectors, by providing equipment and lines of credit, to keep the society moving.

We have rolled out a financial relief package for our partners to ensure business continuity; we are also offering additional support through the Working Capital Solutions (WCS) programme and introducing new team-based pricing options to make all training more affordable for our partners’ teams.

Our Connected Workplace programme was launched in 2009. In 2013, we established our 2020 goal to enable 50 per cent of our workforce to work flexibly. We have already surpassed this goal with around 65 per cent of our team members leveraging work flexibility in their job.

This has helped share our expertise with customers and partners to switch to this new work culture with ease.

Our infrastructure, monitoring tools and network topology has been empowering the WFH team. We are observing higher interest in other remote working solutions such as business PCs, Workspace One, virtualisation and SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) solutions, monitors, Dell Technologies Cloud, Dell PC as a service and other peripherals.

Our customers are concerned about the changing environment. The need of the hour is for businesses to be closer to their customers. Since this is for the first time we are seeing thousands of people working from home, customers are seeking lots of help.

There are a lot of factors that come into play here. There’s additional capacity that’s needed for VPN and virtual desktop interface capacity, as well as essential support and services to keep all their systems running.

Hence, we have implemented multiple initiatives across the globe to serve our customers during these critical times.

We have rolled out flexible payment solutions, remote working solutions like unified workspace, virtual desktop infrastructure and many more. Moreover, we have our business continuity plans in place, with our supply chain and services teams working round the clock to help customers meet their business-critical technology needs.

We have partnered with the Ministry of Family Health and Welfare (MoHFW) for the Ayushman Bharat Non Communicable Diseases (NCD) programme and have developed a technology platform which is being used across 21 States.

The team is enhancing the NCD software system with a module for Covid-19 risk assessment and monitoring of NCD patients. Through our partnership with Invest India, we are contributing for personal protection equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers,and have provided 25,000 N95 masks to healthcare professionals.

We have launched the Tinker from Home initiative (for students) in collaboration with Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Ayog; and deployed the Covid-19 War Room solution for the Government of Karnataka to manage infected patients. with our partner NGO developing a module on the ideal quarantine period.

It has become evident that digital technologies will play an essential role in business continuity, during as well as post the crisis. Businesses therefore will need to look at the right technologies and efficiency in IT services. Businesses will pivot towards adoption of digital technologies and simultaneously shift their investment priorities.

While the overnight transition to a remote workforce was a feat, we know the transition back to site might be just as difficult or more. Our top priorities include ensuring the health and safety of our team, communities and customers, as well as our “return to site” strategy.

There’s opportunity to further reinvent and redefine “work” by using our values to develop new ways of working, creating a strong customer experience, increasing our work-from-home footprint, advancing our 2030 Moonshot goals by reducing carbon footprint and opening up new opportunities to bring in diverse talent, and continuing to evolve our Connected Workplace programme.

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