While Dell Technologies’ global business grew 17 per cent annually, its Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) business saw a 50 per cent y-o-y growth in the same period.
In an interview with BusinessLine, Amit Midha, President, APAC & Japan, Dell Technologies shares the reasons why India has been the “star” market in the APJ region, and what excites the company as its customers embark on a decade-long technology opportunities in multi-cloud, 5G, and sustainable security.
India is currently at an interesting junction now that 5G auction is going to happen anytime soon. What are the Dell offerings to look forward to?
5G will be transformative. It will create lot of SMBs to be able to access and connect enterprise applications seamlessly. There will be a significant opportunity around remote offices to work. New use cases whether to run EV-charging, its programmability and autonomous nature becomes very much possible. Other new use cases in gaming, cashing, fintech, edtech, and others, will leverage 5G to create new outcomes.
We are excited and we are going to take part in building this infrastructure that is future ready. One of the things 5G does is instead of trying to use proprietary stuff, it creates a more programmable open LAN sort of scenario which reduces cost dramatically, gives a lot more bandwidth in data capacity and creates the resiliency that enterprises are looking for. Hence, remote locations and new applications will benefit.
How significant is the Indian market for Dell and what are the core areas that the India team has been working on?
India is strategic and a top 10 market for us. We want to make sure that we are investing and bring growth here.
We are launching products here pretty much the same time as we launch anywhere else. We have the best-in-class sales tools, labour, and partner structure.
We have all the assets including the support team, technology, engineering, manufacturing and marketing resources. We even run several things from here for the globe such as product support and software. We are proud of how important role our infrastructure here in India plays for the entire company and global operations.
Dell has also been actively working with the government and institutions for upskilling Indian talent. Could you tell us more about it?
Across the region, we’re doing a lot in terms of community engagement and making a difference.
Now in terms of India partnership, we have observed 3.2 million beneficiaries across 3,800 schools in association with Shikshana Foundation and then of course through digital life care site we have built a way to integrate the data from the citizens into creating better health outcomes, better appointment management before people leave villages to travel for a day or two to get some help from the healthcare system they can create some of those outcomes.
We have done partnership with Microsoft and the Hope Foundation, we have Dell Kaushal Kendra, first ATL Tinkering Lab, Project Future Ready, and then also established center of excellence in partnership with Andhra Pradesh government.
From a start-up perspective, we’ve partnered with MeitY Startup Hub that’s going to fund 2,000 start-ups and we’re going to open up our labs and solution centers for many of these start-ups to be able to have knowledge transfer and understanding of how to build a world class network to run differentiated outcomes.
In fact, just to let you know, we announced in Singapore and since it’s public, I can tell you we partnered with several universities to train 5,000 people to get digitally savvy with a certification program.
We think that technology is the differentiator, and using technology people can leapfrog, companies can leapfrog, and having a knowledge, awareness, and the skills is a protocol in that journey to leapfrogging and that’s I think is a key piece.
Are there specific sectors that the start-ups are focusing on and how is Dell helping them grow and innovate?
Well, I mean innovation can come from any side if we just stand back at it. Every time we visualise something you’re putting a footprint of yours in the digital space which is what’s called data, using data you can create personalise and you can create automation, you can create Metaverse, you can create a new ways of engaging, delighting, entertaining you.
So startups can come in from many sides, but some particular ones are mission driven for us. While we can help commercial start-ups, what we like to get engaged in is basically where we are creating long term capacity and capability for country from a STEM training perspective.
Where we actually go up supporting groups that are that have traditionally been marginalised or have been missing from the tech base like SheCodes Program and then of course the social entrepreneurship to me is a great way across from the country and so we want to make sure as we move on this, it’s not just about selling product and supporting the commercial entities, it’s also about creating a mission driven start-ups.
How has the laptop sales performance been in India so far and how is the order book looking like for the B2B sales in the coming quarters?
Well, market is continuing to grow and we are committed to grow faster than the market and from that perspective I think it’s a growing business, lot of large projects are underway which is to create work from home or work from anywhere or future of working as a mainstream theme and so we’re pretty excited about this, but at the same time more and more companies are now are thinking about security.
They are putting lot more of workload in the data center and they just don’t want privacy and the data theft to happen so we support our customers in all sorts of situation, but to answer your question the last year as I mentioned, we shipped record 59.3 million notebooks and that was a massive record overall a business. We’re going faster than other competitors. APJ is growing faster and India is the star within APJ region.
In the Union Budget, the Government have given data centres ‘infrastructure’ status and now they will be eligible for various incentives as well as funding that comes from the Government towards the sector. What opportunities lie ahead for Dell and has there been a significant jump in setting up data centers locally?
I think we have several customers who Cloud Service Providers (CSP), they’ve build sovereign Cloud, they’ve build dedicated Cloud for customers. We are looking at the Edge growth which is data centers being closer to where the data is originating and you know the 5G is going to change that wherein each tower is really a mini data center right and so you will see data center everywhere. Soon every neighborhood will have a data center just to speak and we’re going to at forefront of this, but you know key thing is the data in the data center.
So now companies are saying, “Okay, now I have infrastructure everywhere, where is my data? How do I secure it? How do I make it compliant? How do I manage it? I have this SaaS offering, I have this public Cloud offering, I have my own infrastructure, how do I manage it with few people I have? I can’t have people dedicated to each type of infrastructure.”
So they need a new kind of infrastructure to manage it all, they need to secure it, they need to comply it, and they need to put data to use without increasing much cost and that’s the multi-cloud journey exciting to us because that is what many customers and companies are looking for us to do for them in creating a new outcome. Data use cases will create better personalization, better outcome, better efficiency, and that’s a journey customers are on.
Where do you see the company and the products as well as the emerging technologies that’s coming in place in India over the next two to three years, India and the APAC region.
Amazing times lie ahead you’re going to have Metaverses, digital twin, you’re going to be able to create so much more immersive and innovative ways of engaging entertaining and gaming that we can hardly imagine.
Just to give you the fact, 85 per cent of the high paying jobs in 2030 have not been created yet, just that tells you how big a disruption that we have and so I think it will be a brand new world that is getting built and folding it from of us, it’s very, very exciting and all of those innovation given India being a top strategic market for us will be available in India pretty much at the same time as we launch globally and we’re exciting for India to do more on a global operations as well.
