'We are not apologetic about hardware'

BANGALORE, INDIA: Dell recently clinched the leadership position in the overall Indian PC market category. Dell, according to IDC's PC tracker for April-June, 2010, claimed a market share of 15.2 per cent. Speaking to CIOL, Sameer Garde, who was recently promoted as services director — Asia Pacific and Japan and Country GM-India, shared about the new role, the challenges ahead and the success mantra for Dell India.

Congratulations on your recent promotion. What are the new responsibilities as services director AP&J? How big is the market for Dell?

Thanks. My responsibilities will continue as the country manager for Dell India but now I will have an expanded role as the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) director for services sales and marketing at Dell. Primarily it is in sync with the company’s reorganization and the strong merger of Perot Systems for the services play.

Asia Pacific with Japan (APJ) poses a huge opportunity for us, with around $100 billion services market. Asia is a large fragmented market with no clear winner in the space. The lager players are not very large in share. It is very much like the India market where the leading brands own around 10 per cent share each.

The core idea is to leverage on our strong relationships in the hardware business and focus on services play. We aim to grab significant market in this geography. After the merger, I am looking at applications, IT outsourcing and growing our existing relationship to the next level.

What is the plan forward for Dell? What would be the key strengths of the company vis-a-vis competition?

Like I said before, Dell has a strong relationship with the enterprises. We are not apologetic about hardware. They have helped in building the $60 billion Dell of today. The journey started with hardware and data centers to building the server-storage solutions. We have gradually expanded our portfolio with project-based services to infrastructure management, to furthermore help desk and services.

Over the past few years, Dell worked on building a complete portfolio with a slew of mergers and acquisitions. This included our biggest acquisition of Perot Systems ($3.9 billion). Now, we are at strong position, where we have SAN, IP storage, service, networking and many more offering to give.

We bought IP storage-area network vendor EqualLogic in 2007. We recently announced the acquisition of Ocarina Network, a storage optimization, de-duplication technology company and Scalent, a virtual infrastructure management company. A few other acquisitions in recent past were Silver back, Kace Networks and MessageOne. Dell is well placed in terms of offering cloud and virtualization etc services.

We emphasize on open solutions. And in being vendor our server can sit on any network, be a Juniper or Brocade unlike with Cisco servers or a few HP blades. Our solution are very competitive. Our businesses achieved profits during 2009.

Despite the talks, the actual implementations on virtualization have been comparatively low. What do you believe are the key factors behind?

Yes, the implementation on virtualization is happening at a lower rate at present. But given the buzz about the various technologies, virtualization would soon catch up with the companies.

One of the key requirements in the industry is to fill the gap between a CIO and a CTO. Industry needs to have CVOs, a chief virtualization officer, who look across the infrastructure from network, server and storage.

He can ensure seamless and dynamic consolidation in a heterogeneous environment. IT managers need to upscale themselves to that level. But the challenges here are talent, training, the right tools and the mindset.

Also the solution/service providers need to do that confidence building exercise to help the customer take the step towards virtualization.

Dell has announced that they would launch their range of smart phones in India. Could you share an idea of when and how you plan to take it forward?

We are very much working towards our smartphone. We are on schedule, but yet to decide on the launch date. We have rolled request and advertisement asking the distributors and various developers on building applications for the product. The market positioning for the products would be more into solution and application play that would feature more than the basic email applications.