John Byrne, President of Sales, Global Theaters and Dell Tech Select, Dell Technologies, sees India as a mature market for Dell. In an exclusive interaction with businessline, Byrne spoke about the global slowdown in tech spending, and how technologies such as Artificial Intelligence are emerging to be the next frontier for growth for Dell.

Q

As AI continues to develop, we still don’t know how it is going to shape up. How does Dell stay ahead of the curve while developing products?

What I love about Dell is that we pride ourselves in having big ears. What does that mean? It means we listen. We have 30,000 sellers across the globe, which I think is the broadest sales organisation on the planet. So, therefore, by default, we’re touching more customers. So, if we can ask the customers the right way of the problems we’re trying to resolve, we can feed that in quickly into our engineering.

We are also spending multiple billions of dollars per year on R&D. I think we’re in a good position, and I think the market reaction says we’re in.

Q

The last two years have been economically very tough, and tech spending of most companies has been affected. What has it been like for Dell?

We have definitely seen some areas that have continued to accelerate spend — Department of Defence, for example. We have continued to see banking continue to accelerate into their investment. But we also saw an acceleration of spend during Covid that we had never seen.

Now, we are seeing demand increase in the public sector space, and we saw it across all the mature countries around the world, including India. So, we saw the continuation of the growth of the federal government demand. We are seeing a lift in our ISG business because of GenAI. In terms of storage, I think projects are accelerating. We’re in a bit of a digestion period, still, these opportunities have not disappeared. It’s just taken a little bit longer as people think about funding and trying to understand what’s happening around the globe. 

Q

Dell reported a good set of quarterly numbers, do you think the worst is over in terms of slowdown in tech spending?

I don’t think any of us ever know that answer, right? We are seeing strong signals coming back into the business. We are definitely seeing some great upside coming through AI. When you hit the AI world, it is becoming more and more sensitive around security. It is becoming a conversation in every customer meeting here in India; it is around data sovereignty and how do you keep your critical data here and then critical data here inside your own company. So, we think we’re going to see some real demand over there.

Q

Where do you see India stand for you in the overall scheme of things?

If you think about it, India is No 5 in GDP, heading to a potential No 3 in the world. This is a phenomenal growth engine. And, again, the conversations that we’re having with the customers, whether it is in banking or defense or retail or healthcare, it’s very similar to other mature countries in the world. So, India is a major focus area for us. 

Q

What are your focus areas going to be sales in the next two years?

My vision, ultimately, is to be the most technically aware and outcome-based sales organisation on the planet, around the globe. I want our team to be able to understand our purpose, our vision, our strategy. I want them to be able to talk outcomes with our customers. And, again, I think we have, because of the breadth of our portfolio, we have an opinion on where they should be, and when we don’t have an opinion, we have the humility to listen.

Q

Are you going to scale up your channel partnerships, given that there has been layoffs in the sales team globally?

From a partner ecosystem, we’re always evolving and developing our partner ecosystem. You think the number of cities that we have here in India alone, here are some cities where we could absolute accelerate more of a partner ecosystem. We have the most profitable channel programme in the industry. We are encouraging our existing partners to sell more of the portfolio; don’t be singularly focussed on a line of business, because again, the customers want to be talking outcome. And, expand into other cities and then adding more partners into the programme.