Dell recently announced its new go-to-market (GTM) strategy for the India market with the aim to tap more enterprise customers with its solutions portfolio. This move has come after Dell global became a privately held company last October and expanded its focus more on the solutions space and not just personal computing (PC) devices.
End-to-End Solutions provider
“Its our global stated strategy that we would like to be a leading solutions provider in the end-to-end scalable solutions space and we are doing whole lot of things – aligning our solutions, resources and investments to get there,” said Alok Ohrie, President & Managing Director – Dell India, during the recently concluded Dell India Executive Summit in Dubai.
According to Ohrie, the new GTM plan is linked with the transformation that Dell has under gone over last few years right from the time when Michael Dell took the charge as CEO in 2007, acquiring software companies, building a solutions stake to all the way being a private company now.
“Privitisation has actually, accelerated the execution pace on being aligned with company’s goals and strategy. And has given us the flexibility, nimbleness and brought back that spirit of entrepreneurship,” added Ohrie.
New GTM strategy
With the new GTM, company changed its routes-to-market (RTM) with a strong focus on customer engagement and wider reach. Unlike, direct approach in the past, Dell India has come up with three RTM that includes Dell Led for direct sales engagement, Partner Led for business accounts with special pricing and products; and Distribution Led for consumer IT products .
Mostly, company was directly serving some 40,000-50,000 customers in the past 6-8 years; but now about 30,000 accounts are expected to get shifted from direct to channel model by this year end. Large enterprises, small and mid size businesses, government organisations, public sector undertaking (PSUs) and consumers are among the Dell’s customer base in India.
Collaborative approach
Now, Dell India is collaborating with channel partners and distributors to take its solutions and technology products to customers in remote areas. It wants to leverage their relationships and engagements with existing customers as well as their technology skills and knowledge.
“The advantage and benefits of this new GTM are improvements in coverage and reach, better engagement with partners, getting closer to customers and being accountable where it counts,” Ohrie, explained, how three RTM will help Dell to expand the customer reach in India.
Advantage and benefits
Dell has a huge presence in India with over 27000 workforce staff. “Its the biggest site presence outside of the US and makes lot of contribution to the corporation from domestic market as well as from global operations point,” stressed Ohrie.
Company has invested some $30 million in manufacturing facility at Sriperumbudur near Chennai, spread over 100 acre land with three advance manufacturing lines for making PCs, servers and notebooks. “It caters to the domestic consumption as well as export to countries and markets like Middle East and Africa. We have started seeing the ramp up in terms of volumes, which is allowing us to take advantage of this existing setup here,” added Ohrie.
Early market gains
According to Ohri, company’s new GTM has got positive market response and during last 6 months, about 250 conversations have happened on the cloud fronts – private, public and hybrid – all kinds of combination.
“About 84 conversations had been on application modernisation, which is the area where we can add more value as we do not have any legacy to protect. On security side, we had 60 conversations. In H12014, our server business grew 44% higher than the market, storage 15%, networking 20% and software 25%. So we definitely are seeing our value proposition and its resonating well with customers in the market,” concluded Ohri.
(Author was hosted by Dell for the Dell India Executive Summit)