DELL’S END TO END SOLUTIONS IS THE KEY TO ADDRESS CUSTOMER CHALLENGES

MANISH GUPTA
Director, Enterprise Solutions Group, Dell India

What are the biggest challenges that Indian CIOs face today and how is Dell poised to address them?

At Dell we are committed to understanding the individual requirements of our customers and thereby enabling them to do more with the products and solutions we offer. Dell recently conducted an ‘India’s Best CIO Mega Trends 2014’ survey towards deriving a better understanding of the challenges and priorities of CIOs in today’s complex IT environment.The survey busted the myth that budgetary concerns were the most significant challenge that CIOs face. Instead they listed Lack of Talent as the most significant, followed by Security threat and Changing business priorities.

Dell enables Clients overcome these challenges by:

•    End to End Solutions: Dell provides end-to-end solutions for all Enterprise IT needs from End user computing to storage, server, networking requirements. Dell’s ability to seamlessly cater to enterprise needs across servers, storage and networking hardware and provide an integrated portfolio to address overall business and IT needs, gives customers an advantage. Dell’s customers can focus their resources on business growth instead of deploying IT resources to take care of backend requirements.

•    Security: Dell has a comprehensive security portfolio which helps businesses defend all their technology touch points and better safeguard their corporate networks, critical data and devices while enabling employee productivity and confidently protecting the mobile workforce. Dell’s end-to-end Connected Security approach ensures both outside-in and inside-out protection against increasing cyber threats.

•    Changing Business Priorities: Dell understands that with evolving customer preferences the market today has become very dynamic. Dell’s focus is on delivering IT that is flexible and scalable enough to support changing workloads while ensuring that customer investments and TCO remains low.  
 
Dell has changed a great deal over the past decade. Would you like to throw light on its transformation from a PC player to an end-to-end solutions provider?

Over the past decade, Dell has undergone a complete transformation from being solely a PC player to an end-to-end solutions provider. This has also changed the role that we play for our customers from being a hardware provider to being a problem solver for customer’s businesses problems.

Through strategic acquisitions Dell has transformed into an end-to-end solutions player with the strongest-ever product and services portfolio. Dell acquired significant new skills and capabilities through acquisitions or companies like Apps Assure, SonicWALL, Wyse Technology, Clerity Solutions, Make Technologies, Quest Software, Gale Technologies and Credant Technologies.

Dell’s efficient IT strategy and philosophy of open, standards-based and scalable IT enables customers to free critical IT dollars for innovation and create solutions that allow them to take advantage of Dell’s pioneering enterprise technologies. Dell offers its customers solutions that help them leverage Cloud, Social Media, BYOD, Big Data and Security - the “Five Forces” for greater efficiency and market success.

Has transformation given Dell an advantage over its competitors? How do you see Dell performing as compared to other key players in the market?

Dell’s ability to provide end to end IT solutions to customers gives it an advantage over competitors. Dell is one of the only credible OEMs in the market to offer customers an end-to-end solutions from device to datacentre.

Dell’s game changing GTM strategy is also contributing to its market growth, with wider and deeper penetration into markets across geographies through its robust and growing partner and distributor network.

How does Dell’s enterprise solutions portfolio aim at addressing its customer’s painpoints?

Dell understands that each enterprise customer’s requirements are unique. Hence we design customisable products and solutions for various workloads. In approaching our customers our four step approach ensures that we provide a holistic solution that addresses all their IT needs: Transform, Connect, Inform, and Protect.
Transform: Transform customer data centers in a way that increases IT agility while lowering costs.
Connect: Increase productivity by enabling the next generation workforce to work securely from anywhere, anytime and on any device.
Inform: Control their data deluge and use it to drive insights to gain a competitive advantage
Protect: Protect themselves from organized attacks to cyber theft.
Rather than locking customers into a single path requiring new hardware, Dell helps customers to deliver results today by working with what they already have, enabling customers to free critical IT dollars for innovation.

Can you name some of your key customers who have benefitted from your solutions?

Customers are at the heart of all that Dell does. With this philosophy we believe that we have transformed the businesses of many of our customers through our scalable, efficient and reliable solutions. Dell’s capabilities across Servers, Storage and Networking have enabled customers like the major ecommerce player MakeMyTrip consolidate their datacenter on high-performance servers to outpace market growth within the expanding online travel sector in India. With Dell’s servers delivering higher performance that could take more load without increasing density or energy consumption, MakeMyTrip was able to manage changing customer demands and market dynamics. Dell offered its PowerEdge 12th generation servers to consolidate their data center infrastructure running the company's private cloud.The client has experienced an increased support in controlling the volume of traffic, enabling the company to proactively pursue new customers.

Bajaj Capital, a major provider of Financial Services was provided with a storage solution that could scale effectively, improve processing performance and ensure regulatory compliance due to the rapid growth of financial data. Dell helped them with an automated tiered storage which enabled them to improve employee efficiency through a four-fold increase in processing speed. Additionally, tiered storage delivered a regulatory compliance which simplified the cost efficiencies and storage management to a great extent.