Enterprise Highway and the Service Lane

BANGALORE, INDIA: What comes first - Chicken or Egg? Finally, product vs. services baskets have waltzed over such charades. They are still a puzzle-bag of sorts but they are now trying to come together in the final answer of an ‘omelette'. After all, does it really matter if technology products are getting more service-tised or IT services are taking the avatar of products in many verticals and markets? Isn't it all irrelevant or better-behind-the-scenes as long as the customer enjoys what comes on the table in final form and as an overall delicious experience?

Services in that sense are not that last piece of jigsaw that used to finish an IT solution's picture. A service offering is not even that perfect frame to envelope a vanilla-product picture in the right width of margins and the right length of support. It is now something that rather defines the picture quintessentially for some tech-world majors. Do they come as a prefix or a suffix to any vendor's product smorgasbord is hence a question as obsolete as poultry industry's aboriginals.

Service-lines are sketching new formats and questions today for many menu cards. Bundles offerings, consumerisation of products, transformation power for old economy portfolios, standardization muscle and a lot more today spins around services. There is a lot that goes in to make sure that eggs are not scrambled too much.

Dell Services for one has around 50,000 employees globally. And Dell in India has around 27,000 employees (incidentally about 25 per cent of Dell's population is in India) of which around 16000 are from Services.

Hemant Kumar, Director- Infrastructure & Cloud Computing, Dell Services India lets us in on the how and why of this renaissance happening around the word ‘services' and its role in re-incarnating the company and the industry.

Services, a hygiene factor or X-factor? How do you see their changing shape in the industry today?

Our approach is to take an end-to-end basket for customers. So for instance, unified solutions can cut down costs on telephony where we provide entire hardware stack and manage it plus maintain the entire thing. Our solutions are really the glue to make solutions stick together and to help customers lay out IT roadmaps well. Customers are looking at offerings like Dell which can work closely with their blueprints. The consulting end, beyond this glue, helps customers look at a future too.

What is the real road that the industry is taking? Is it product-isation of services or vice versa?

Any tech-driven product is in a state of shape-lift and more things apart and beyond standardization and automation are visible now. It can be about basic technologies standardized in a box like virtualization or it can be converged infrastructure where in the box is pre-configured with various components. That can put services in a plug-and-play format as they get loaded on the top. That can work as well as an option. That said, there is always space though for newer technology offerings. So parts of cloud will be a bit standardised. However, an existing environment with applications running on it can have scope to figure out things like customization. More and more things will get standardized and productized but there will be room for other stuff too. Example, monitoring can be highly standardized but for hybrid cloud environments, there would always be need for some level of customization.

Dell is a classic transformation story today. What has been or will be the role of ‘services' in this script? How may the recent change of affairs at the top transpire in that context for this space? Would presence of long-entrenched giants be easy to navigate?

Biggest benefit of current state would be around transformation and faster decision-making. More and more innovation and a holistic approach to market is what you can expect certainly. There will be a genuine spread around hardware, software and services so expect aggression to be visible in a solution story to the market and higher business-end spectrums. Last three to four years have been strongly about transformation at Dell from a pre hardware-centric player to an end-to-end player and that's where services part fits in at pivotal points. We are very clear on what we are bringing to the market which is choice and flexibility. Rivals may depend on monolithic stuff and preserving their legacy or extracting margins or maintaining licenses or platforms. In fact, we are witnessing a lot of resonance in market from customers making a shift from legacy to open architectures.

How will the mid-market piece look like?

In the mid-market lower side segment so much comes preconfigured and standardized where consultants are not much required. We have remote infrastructure management and standard offerings in that slot but we are equally well placed when it comes to work for cutting-edge companies that are expanding and diversifying and figuring out applications. That's the part where we customize services. So yes we are at both ends and depending on the segment we offer both standardization and customization with consulting.

Does a 'Bundled' approach work well in the market?

We can work on three different models. We can buy licenses from other majors and give services on top of that or on Dell hardware or any other hardware. We can give only software of completely modeled solution. It's mix choice from Dell for customers with open scalable plug-ins and no-tie-downs as benefits that one can count on.

What's the idea from here on?

Watch for Dell. Dell is uniquely positioned and not at some ‘I have to protect and bundle' fag ends. We keep acquiring IT and assets that complement the market. We will be delivering great stuff.