Dell Technologies, the $90.6-billion technology infrastructure behemoth, endeavours to grow faster than the market in all the 180 countries that it operates in, including India. The companyhas invested over $20 billion in R&D over the last five years. The Dell Technologies family includes Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, Secureworks, Virtustream and VMware. In an interaction with BusinessLine , Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, shares the company’s roadmap for partnering with customers in their digital transformation journey. Excerpts:

As organisations adopt more technology in their digital transformation journey, they are adding business risks , a cause for major concern to their boards. How do you intend to negate business risks for customers who opt to go all-in with Dell?

You know, if you think about the challenges that customers face, the thing that I’ve heard is that they don’t want to be systems integrators any more. But the alternative for them would be to join with say 20 different companies. Customers don’t want to have to go to 20 different technology providers and put it all together themselves. We have a scale and breadth of capabilities, from the data centre and cloud to security, which is resonating very well with customers. I think part of this is coming from the sense of urgency. Companies have to re-imagine what they are doing, given all these new technologies, and they have to do that quickly without having to worry about all the infrastructure. Because if they don’t, there are other competitors and newer entrants in their space that are moving very fast. In such a scenario, I think fewer partners and industry consolidation will be the trend. That’s certainly what our results suggest. We have been gaining market share quite consistently across storage for the last four quarters, and across servers and client business for 25 quarters in a row. I think there’s a trend toward more complete solutions and we are in a great position to offer it.

You had shared with BusinessLine in October 2016 that cross-selling to Dell and EMC customers presented a huge opportunity for revenue generation. What kind of success have you seen with that strategy?

If I look at last year, we added $11 billion in revenue. So, it was a 14 per cent growth. What’s interesting about the the figure is that, if you take all our traditional competitors and add up their growth, it was less than $11 billion, so we are really growing quite a lot. And a lot of that was from cross-selling to Dell and EMC customers. We have gone to customers who were buying storage from us but not servers. They were buying servers and not storage. Or they were buying one of those two, but not PCs. So increasingly, what you see is a completely integrated set of offerings across hardware and software infrastructure, that help our customers build out this digital future. We created the essential infrastructure company and our customers have responded very well. We are gaining share, investing in our business, and paying down debt. We are integrating and innovating across our family of businesses like never before.

Dell’s revenue in India is just 3 per cent of its global revenue of $90.6 billion. What in your estimate is India’s actual potential in terms of revenue contribution to Dell?

We endeavour in all 180 countries where we are present to grow faster than the market, including in India. I think we have been able to do that consistently. We have a great set of products and tremendous partners that often create that last vertical mile of specialisation required to understand how customers are going to use that technology in a local context. We don’t forecast our revenue by countries. Our revenue strategy is customised and localised by our teams in each of the countries. We have not underperformed in India. The market data looks good.

The writer was in Las Vegas for Dell World Technologies 2019 on an invitation from Dell Technologies.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW