“Mobility is all about content delivery, content storage and applications. This is an interesting space for Dell, we can bring lot of value to this area,” says Alok Ohrie, President and Managing Director – Dell India. In conversation with Pankaj Maru. Excerpts…
What is your view of the Indian market? What steps is Dell taking to garner a bigger slice of the Indian market?
The business sentiments in India are very bullish now. The government is taking actions that can create several new opportunities for the IT sector. In fact, the government has already defined its vision of Digital India, which will become a catalyst for new investments. We believe that the market here is poised for a massive growth over a period of next 3 years. Hence, we are aggressively following the new business opportunities. With a new Go To Market strategy (GTM), Dell has changed its route-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. 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.
Some large players have exited the IT hardware business. Does this lead to the creation of new opportunities for Dell?
The process of consolidation in the IT industry started with the lower end of products, which is the peripherals, and now it has gone to the PC range of products. About 8-10 years ago, some of the companies got bought over, some businesses got hived-off and that process of churning is continuing till now. There are players in the PC business who are either openly declaring that they don’t want to continue in the business or are looking for buyers for business to be bought. This phenomenon has now got extended to the infrastructure space, and we are seeing early signs of consolidation in the server market. Today there are far fewer number of players left, even though the market remains the same. Hence the opportunity becomes available to the company that is best positioned to go and capture it, and Dell is very well positioned. Having gone private we are capable of quickly deploying our resources to the areas where we see growth. We are also in a position to change the business model in order to have cost efficiency.
Many tech companies are now focussed on mobility, but we are not seeing any major move by Dell in this area. Why?
In mobility, from devices point of view, we have a range of tablets. We continue to make our tablets richer by adding new features to them. In couple of months, we will make further enhancement of the product line. We are planning to come up with voice enabled tablets and many other innovative products. However, currently we are not looking at smartphones. In any case the form factor is changing and when I talk about voice enabled tablet, I am essentially talking about a device that can also provide the functionality of a smartphone. We are not in the space of a smartphone of 5 inches or less, but we are very much there in the tablet space of 7 inches and above.
What is Dell planning to do in the area of mobility solutions?
Mobility is all about content delivery, content storage and applications. This is an interesting space for Dell, we can bring lot of value to this area. For instance, the companies that store the content and deliver it to the mobiles of their consumers need efficient storage solutions. They also need servers, networking solutions, etc. Dell is a leader in this area of storage, servers, networking. We are also in a position to play a role in the area of developing an architecture for the hardware and software to work in a cost effective and efficient way. Then there is the issue of security, which is a big challenge for most companies. We have solutions for protecting data that is sitting in the infrastructure or is being transmitted or is in the device of the consumers.
