"High value workloads on-premise is really critical part of this hybrid cloud picture"

Dell EMC brings together teams that were earlier having different product conversations to form a bigger team fostering a common customer-centric narrative. The company understands the challenges and requirements of its customers. It also helps them with its wide product portfolio.

In a chat with VARINDIA, Kris Day, Vice-President, Modern Data Centre - Asia Pacific & Japan Dell EMC discusses about modern data center, HCI and CI, growth in APJ market and success factors of the organisation

A modern data center consists of automation, orchestration, self-service, service catalogues and customers are shifting to it from traditional environment. It helps in workloads. Explaining on the concept of modern data center, Kris says, “This is about transformation; this is about customers that consistently want to move from a traditional thinking environment where they construct best of breed three tier infrastructures to an environment where they consume infrastructure. It’s more about automation, orchestration, self-service, service catalogues. These are the things that define the modernization of the data center. That doesn’t mean that they no longer have a requirement for infrastructure or traditional storage, this becomes a workload conversation. It becomes a conversation that says you are going to have different workloads and it will have different requirements.

Hyper-converged & Converged Infrastructure

Hyper-converged and converged infrastructures provide a cloud like experience to the customers. HCI and CI are often deployed together as a part of the same eco-system to provide customers a seamless experience. On-premise and high value workloads on- premise are two important and challenging aspect of public cloud.

“Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) and conversed infrastructure (CI) is a very relevant part of this journey. Those environments are there to provide a cloud like experience. Once we have identified that somebody wants to save money on traditional IT, automate and orchestrate, there is a very good chance that HCI and or CI, we see in many situations where both of them are deployed together and will be deployed as a part of that ecosystem. On-premise and high value workloads on-premise are really important and critical part of this hybrid cloud picture that we are building together, it is also one of the most challenging things in public cloud. High value workloads like SAP, like Oracle high value applications, they still represent around 51% or more of the applications deployed on-premise and they are growing. So, they are not moving to public cloud as was initially anticipated. Now, we are no longer talking about cloud first conversation,” explains Kris.

Growth in APJ Markets

It has been observed that 80% of the organizations are shifting its workloads from public cloud environment to on-premise. It does not mean that cloud is not growing. It will continue to grow. There are few big happenings which is going on in this environment and is driven by the idea of transformation and the idea of different landing zones for different workloads.

"Cloud is definitely still growing and what we are seeing is a trend of the workload repatriation. When I think about the other indicator being the share, the total storage market last year ran 3.4 billion was projected to decline by 2% and then the IDC kept refining that judgement as we went through the course of the year. In India, the market was even more aggressive, it was a 16.7% growth in the storage market, which was phenomenal. Indian storage market is one of the fastest growing markets in the world. Our revenue grew by 35% or more in the APJ market. Dell EMC continues to be the undisputed leader in the storage market. Our mid-range business grew by 20% and in a market like India; price point is one of the key indicators. We have about 30% share in the mid-range segment. There is huge potential for India and the market is expected to grow by eight % in the next three-four years,” foresees Kris.

Success factors of Dell EMC

Strength of our portfolio- We are not a single product company. We have the ability and the portfolio reach to have a consultative engagement, understand the customer requirements and challenges.

Consultative Approach- It is not just about having a wide product portfolio. It is also about being able to know how to have that conversation with the customers around their requirements and how do we help them in the transition & transformation.

Engagement in alignment with the strategically aligned businesses- Crucial to our success is on how we engage with strategically aligned businesses like VMware, Pivotal or Boomi. When we think of the multi-cloud business, there is the Dell EMC part of the story and Dell Technologies one-cloud strategy, which brings together the capabilities of VMware and Dell EMC to deliver a much more capable and highly differentiated cloud platform.

Complete idea of the cloud strategy- Dell Technologies is a company that provides end-to-end solutions. For example, our CloudIQ comes with everything that we sell. It is not something we charge for but it is a cloud based data collection environment based upon literally thousands upon thousands of installed based units gathering diagnostic & health information so that we can use AI to get lot more predictive and present information to customers help with real-time issues before they even get there. Then there is cloud consumption model which we do with our partners, then there is Dell Financial service (DFS) to help us put in place unique financial models that help satisfy the needs of the customers and finally the full cloud solutions businesses.

Timing- Stars are aligning perfectly for Dell Technologies. Markets are accelerating and our results are maintaining the momentum. We are growing well in most of the markets that we operate in.