Dell EMC says the combined entity is well placed to guide customers on their digital journey

Soma Tah

With the completion of Dell-EMC merger last year, Dell Technologies has created a combined portfolio of solutions to cater to a vast range of IT infrastructure needs for organizations looking to build their digital future.

We spoke to Dmitri Chen, Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Specialty Sales for Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) at Dell EMC to know more on how the company is planning to use its expansive technology portfolio to solve some of the IT and digital transformation challenges faced by the customers in India in terms of managing hybrid cloud, switching to a converged infrastructure, etc.

Edited excerpt:

As the shift to digital has become inevitable, what kind of opportunity do you see in India?

Indian enterprises have recognized the urgency to transform digitally and with the Indian government driving the agenda of Digital India, we foresee a massive growth for the IT industry.

To successfully navigate through the murky waters of the digital era, businesses in India need to transform people, processes, and the technology upon which the business is built, from the edge to the core to the cloud. We are well placed to guide customers on their journeys and to be a partner in their modernization plans spanning the edge, to the core, to the cloud.

As a combined company, we have emerged as an end-to-end, holistic solutions provider, positioned to empower Indian enterprises to embrace change and transform their IT infrastructure.

Has the merger and the combined portfolio helped you to tap into the enterprises' needs better?

We see a huge opportunity for our enterprise stacks going forward, as businesses are increasingly opting for a hybrid and multi-cloud environment. On the one hand, we are noticing that the misson-crtiical traditional applications are moving towards a hybrid environment to leverage the public cloud for lowering the operating costs. While on the other hand, we are also seeing the cloud-native applications moving more towards the hybrid for the on-premises needs because of predictability, proximity of data, lower latency, etc.

We operate in both domains-we have software-defined capability to help move workloads off premises or on-premises safely. It's a massive opportunity for us to tap into the organization's IT management and transformation needs with our combined solutions portfolio with dell EMC focused around infrastructure, VMware focused on virtualization of storage, server and network and taking that up to a multi-cloud management orchestration, as well as our platfrom-as-a-service offering with Pivotal cloud foundry.

How does it impact the Converged/hyperconverged infra market?

The demand for converged systems is steadily rising. As per IDC forecasts, the overall global spending on converged systems to grow at a compound annual rate of nearly 21 percent, going from $8.2 billion in 2014 to $17.5 billion in 2018.

As organizations in India are now investing in emerging technologies, the first step towards innovation is the modernization of their IT infrastructures. Businesses are increasingly considering adoption of converged infrastructure solutions to solve main IT transformation challenges. One of the main issues that transforming organizations face when moving to more agile and cost-effective IT models is that the legacy systems typically don't scale out much and different systems don’t operate well also with each other.

Our combined portfolio allows us to respond to these issues and offer our customers solutions that will be compatible with existing infrastructure and applications. We now have a comprehensive converged platforms portfolio in the market ranging from a block-based, hyperconverged to complete solutions, catered to the different needs of business customers, ranging from small and midsize organizations to the largest enterprises.

How do you help companies to brace for the next wave of technologies such as AI, AR and VR?

While these spaces are still emerging, but if we look at today's millennial employees, they expect AR and VR to be part of their workplace and their work experience. If the organizations want to tap into that workforce, they need to have a strategy around these emerging technologies. We are investing to bring some fresh innovations to the market around these technologies.

We are also putting a considerable amount of efforts and investment into understanding how the infrastructure would be leveraged through AI. We have to do a much tighter integration for some of the new trends like machine learning, AI, AR and VR, as they captures more data than ever before and that data will eventually sit on the infrastructure. Therefore, an increasing number of our forthcoming announcements are expected around them.

Multiple overlapping and competing product lines often tend to create confusion among the customers. How do you address that? 

When we merged Dell and EMC one year ago, we divested companies that presented some product overlap. In fact, the merger brought together complementary product portfolios that help our customers transform their IT, Workforce, and Security. In a climate where the pace of change is unprecedented – almost one in every two businesses in India claim they are unaware of what their industry will look like in three years – having a clear vision and strength of portfolio will remain our key differentiators.

We understand that no business is the same and the approach to transformation varies and our commitment has never been stronger to support and guide our customers on their digital transformation journeys. With the merger, we’re not only able to give our customer the advantage of working with a larger sales and support organization but also solve a wider range of their IT transformation challenges.