“Mobility will dictate the form factor of computing devices”

How has Dell’s transition from being a products company to a solutions company been?

Dell is moving away from being a silo-driven company to an IT resource group. We now have physical and virtual offerings which are affordable and easy to use. The journey has taken about 3-4 years and we are now catering to a lot of customers who mostly look for flexible solutions. We are now also the number one systems provider to healthcare companies in the US.

How is Dell innovating in the enterprise solutions space?

We continue to believe that technologies such as virtualisation and storage consolidation offer clear benefits and will continue to drive the market. From Dell’s India perspective, we estimate the market to grow leaps and bounds given that India is in the phase of Infrastructure build and refresh. Dell has a comprehensive suite of offerings in providing Infrastructure solutions, services around modernisation of data centres including application re-engineering and migration services from Perot.

We will continue to see a higher degree of automation, and Dell’s approach to services is really all about being technology intensive versus people intensive. There will also be a degree of consumerisation of IT and immense focus on mobility – Dell believes that mobility will dictate the form factor of computing devices in the years to follow. We expect to see a proliferation of devices in different screen sizes to meet different needs as accessibility of information-on-the-go becomes inevitable. Dell will therefore continue to work towards offering a host of choices to consumers so they may be able to choose the most relevant and convenient form factor or more than one device based on their needs.

Lastly, in the context of cloud computing, Dell’s cloud solutions for the Virtual Era extend from virtualisation of IT resources to the deployment and use of private or public clouds.

How have acquisitions such as Compellent, Force10 augmented your business?

Ocarina Networks with its groundbreaking content-aware optimisation technology dramatically reduces storage space requirements.

Compellent is a natural extension of Dell’s recent acquisition strategy and adds additional muscle to the company’s intelligent data management story. Compellent’s unique Fluid Data architecture takes control of your information from client to cloud & addresses emerging business needs without disruption.

InSite One, a leading service provider of cloud-based medical data archiving, storage, and disaster recovery solutions for the healthcare industry, allows Dell to expand its portfolio with the addition of archiving-as-a-service and storage-as-a-service. Dell InSite One will provide healthcare customers with a scalable, end-to-end and vendor-neutral image management and archiving solution. Dell can deliver this through the cloud, on-premise or as a hybrid combination.

Boomi is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) integration leader that helps businesses reap the full value of cloud computing. Powered by its revolutionary AtomSphere technology, Boomi offers the industry’s only pure SaaS application integration platform that takes the cost and complexity out of integrating applications by allowing easy transfer of data between cloud-based and on-premise applications with no appliances, no software and no coding required. So Boomi solves, arguably, one of the, I think, top barriers to SaaS and cloud adoption, which is integration

Force10 Networks – Dell is taking the next step in its strategy to help customers streamline end-user, datacenter operations, including reducing IT costs, managing data growth and simplifying management. The acquisition of Force10 Networks’s product portfolio, R&D, patent portfolio, and sales and servicing functions add datacenter networking IP to Dell’s server, storage, systems management, and solutions offerings.

How has the response from Indian companies been to the innovations in enterprise and storage solutions?

Over 70 per cent of the budgets of CIOs goes in continually maintaining infrastructure which is a big problem, since they are then left with very little to spend on new innovation projects that might be more important to their business. There is constant pressure to improve efficiency, reduce labour and facilitate automated provisioning of resources for higher asset utilization and provisioning of workloads to where assets are sitting idle.

The other issue is the open versus proprietary debate – a lot of CIOs who are increasingly becoming wary of vendors who are trying to box them in and eliminate their choices.

For UST Global, an end-to-end IT services and solutions company, Dell provided the path for consolidation by reducing the foot print of physical servers to almost 30:1. The simplification of management with Dell’s Blades Architecture (Storage, Server and Networking as part of the enclosure) and elimination of 200-plus old physical servers helped save significant acquisition costs and allowed simplified remote deployment and monitoring.

What does Dell’s enterprise solutions roadmap look like for the next year?

We are working on gaining insight on current and emerging data centre trends and technologies that are enabling opportunities for IT leaders to unlock innovation while protecting current IT investments.

Enterprises today allocate their already thin IT resources and budgets towards just ‘keeping the lights on.’ Various studies show this to be between 70 – 80 per cent of the budgets.

This leaves very little in the hands of the CIO to invest in strategic projects for the organization. Dell can help to curtail such expenditure, thereby releasing precious resources for strategic spend that helps them innovate and become a stronger business.

We also focus on overarching storage strategy with Intelligent Data Management. We see storage as one of the key drivers in the technology industry today and are betting big on storage: whether virtualised data centres or from growing cloud adoption, storage will be a key building block and Dell has invested substantial resources in the last 12 – 18 months to build a comprehensive portfolio.