Having worked with Dell for over 20 years, Amit Midha puts in perspective the transformation of the Texas-based firm. He likens it with the car itself as opposed to selling car components, allowing you to hit the road immediately. Midha, who is President and Executive Vice-President (Asia-Pacific and Japan Commercial) of Dell EMC, relates the tectonic changes that are happening in the technology consumption side and how it is impacting societies and companies themselves.
Dell has, itself, undergone several changes over the last 10 years. From a predominantly desktop PC player, the Texas-based firm now has a ‘family of businesses’ that promises to realise the digital future of its clients. The offerings include a hybrid cloud, software-defined data centres, converged infrastructure, platform-as-a-service, data analytics, mobility and cyber security. It turned private and pulled off arguably the biggest acquisition (EMC) in the IT industry in 2016, creating a $74-billion Dell Technologies. Dell Technologies is the combined entity encompassing the entire family of businesses with over 1.40 lakh employees.
In Hyderabad recently, Midha spoke about the convergence of hardware, software, security and the talent pool required to take care of this transformation. The company, he says, had realised about four years ago that it was focusing too heavily on hardware. “We realised that the way we were working wasn’t working. So, we needed to go faster. We needed to be innovative. We needed to spend more money to create new outcomes,” Midha says.
“So we decided to take the company private and that changed the culture. Made ourselves more focused on customer,” he says. “We are building a new type of company that is focused on creating essential infrastructure technology solutions that would drive forth an industrial revolution. So that’s what we are focused on,” he points out.
Talking about the transformation, he likens it to selling a ready-to-drive car instead of components of a car. “We are spending huge amounts on R&D, in creating customer outcomes. Not giving them components, so to speak, but a fully integrated solution. That’s the change we have made,” he explains. “We are moving to a more data-centric economy. The more companies use data in their decision making, in their planning, the more successful they can be. And the sources of data are increasing. The amount of data is increasing,” he says.
Data insights
“Data, its management, its security and getting insights from that data is becoming important. You need to have capabilities around these needs,” he points out. “We believe that the future of society is changing in a significant manner. And technology is evolving in an exponential manner and in a way that can create unexpected positive outcomes. We can solve things that we couldn’t solve earlier using technology,” he observes.
Using data to create better personalised products and services. And the more customers can create those sort of strategies, the more they will be able to sustain and be successful. He says Dell’s investments internally go into four areas -- digital transformation, IT transformation, workforce transformation, and the fourth, security transformation.
A little more than a year after the Dell-EMC merger, how is it progressing? “We are quite pleased with how things have gone. The reason it has gone extremely well, because one, the companies were a good match for each other. There was very little overlap. And the combination of two industry giants, in that perspective is fantastic to see how well things have gone,” he says.
India plans
For Dell, India looks a promising market. Initiatives such as Digital India, Startup India and the Goods and Services Tax would go a long way in improving the India market through digitisation. “Digitisation can bring transparency. When you bring transparency, you can remove anything that thrives in an in-transparent way. We are investing in India. We are growing. We are hiring more people here,” he said.