Barely a year after he joined Dell at its headquarters in Austin, Texas, in 1999, he was asked to come to India to check out the IT scene and look for opportunities. “I went back and said we should start something in India,” recalls Ganesh Lakshminarayan, President and Managing Director of Dell India.

In 2000, Dell didn't have any presence in India; he was asked to put up a business plan, which was approved. “For a newcomer in the company that was pretty encouraging and I came to start our first operation in Bangalore in 2000.”

Prior to that he graduated in computer science from the Guindy Engineering College in Chennai in 1989, and joined TCS through campus recruitment as a software programmer. In 1994, he left TCS, and went to the US for an MBA. After getting the degree, he worked for Chrysler and IBM for a while before joining Dell. His first role, in finance, lasted barely a week. At that time Dell was getting into the Internet in a big way, and he joined the online services or E support group.

India operations

On the challenges he faced in setting up Dell's India operation, Lakshminarayan says the initial challenge was to prove “we could start something here. But surprisingly we did not face any bureaucratic hassles. With little infrastructure, we operated out of a small room in Bangalore. The STPI was extremely helpful even though the Dell brand was not well known in India then.”

He set up the operations, hired the local team and returned to e business in Austin, but was sent back after a year to India to run the Bangalore site. This was expanded to all of India and then Manila; meanwhile he grew from manager to director and his present role was created three months ago.

Dell's original plans for India were very conservative; “we didn't expect to grow so much. Our original plan was to have 1,000 people in three years, but in five years we went to 10,000.”

Three years ago, Dell set up a manufacturing plant in Sriperumbudur near Chennai, which now makes 1.5 lakh units annually — desktops, notebooks and servers. At this facility, about 425 young men and women have been recruited from the rural areas of Tamil Nadu. Lakshminarayan explains that this decision was taken because, initially, the Tamil Nadu government was keen that Dell India set up its manufacturing unit in a Tier II or III city. Chennai was chosen as it had the required infrastructure, but the management made a conscious decision to hire only from rural Tamil Nadu.

And that decision has paid off; the employees are both hardworking and efficient and “we've grown 70 per cent this year over last year and almost 95 per cent of what we sell in India comes from this unit,” he says. Actually, his team made a conscious decision to hire people from a background other than hospitality, as other IT companies were doing, right from its Bangalore operations. People from sales and manufacturing were hired even then and this gambit paid off when the Chennai manufacturing plant was set up in 2008. “Today we are the No. 1 hardware manufacturer in India and our ability to attract talent is very good. The percentage of the call centre work we do has become smaller, not in absolute, but relative terms.”

Unique Indian advantage

Lakshminarayan thinks India has a unique advantage of having both technological and people skills. If Indian companies can combine their technology expertise with people skills, they can take on businesses, transform processes and add more bottomline value. This is already happening, he adds, with the bigger companies acquiring BPOs and other assets and “going to the market with a combined value proposition. It is a little slow but it is happening. We in Dell do not look at it as BPO work, but the selling of services because companies in the Indian market realise that reaching the customer with an end solution adds value and brings in more profitability.”

As Dell India's chief, he is proud of having built “pretty big assets in India. We've become the top manufacturer of computers in India, being the No 1 in both desktops and notebooks. Now we want to be the No 1 solution provider in India.”

He also feels there is much more scope for absorbing IT services in the domestic arena. Of India's $50-billion total services market, about $40 billion worth services are exported. “I think it is time for us to turn the consumption of services inward; there is phenomenal demand from our corporates which are now competing globally. To become more efficient and competent they have to use technology.” Governments too are leaning more on e-governance, and are becoming more transparent and efficient; Indian hospitals and the healthcare and education sectors are fast expanding and would require more IT services and solutions to become more efficient. “It is very similar to China turning from an export-driven market to a consumption-driven market; we should be able to consume more services at home and we at Dell want to participate in that.”

India versus China

On more competition from China in the future he says: “I don't look at it as India versus China; in software services, many companies are saying we want to continue to be in India but we also want an India+1 model. And when companies look at China+1 model for manufacturing, India has a great opportunity to be that model.”

On Dell having a larger manufacturing facility in China, Lakshminarayan says, “You should expect it to be big because we have been much longer in China and China has the advantage of components manufacturing. But what is more interesting is that when Michael (Dell) met our Prime Minister recently, he talked about India becoming the IT hardware destination, and based on that a taskforce has been set up and the Central Government is looking at this industry as a focus area and bringing in more incentives, packages and stimulus.”

He says this is the most exciting time for anybody to be in India; the confidence of the younger generation is infectious and unlike the earlier generation which was content to bag jobs in big companies, “many of them are trying to create jobs. And they don't ask: ‘Can we do it?' They say ‘Why not?' The colonial mindset is completely gone and that is the biggest change that has come in.”

On the challenges and roadblocks in India's development path, Lakshminarayan says we are lagging behind on the infrastructure front, but encouraging signals have come in through the infrastructure sector seeing increasing investment. Swanky airports have come up in places such as Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore. “We also need to continue to strengthen our institutions so that the business environment becomes much more transparent. Because the dream we need to show our youngsters is that they can become entrepreneurs and decent human beings who can do business in a decent and ethical manner and still become rich. If we can give that confidence, then more and more people will want to become entrepreneurs,” he adds.

> rasheeda@thehindu.co.in

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