Long known for its product prowess, the vendor now wants to be seen as a solutions player with end-to-end skills in the enterprise. By Prashant L Rao
Dell’s second iteration, after the return of Michael Dell to the company named after him, has seen the company make a concerted push into the enterprise space. To that end, formerly best known for PCs, Dell has become a name to reckon with in servers and now it wants to achieve similar success in storage and to a lesser extent in networking.
Dell’s always believed in open standards and technologies and, among the server majors, it was the first to stick to a x86-only policy. The vendor’s aggressive push in servers has paid off.
“Globally, we are ahead of the competition in the x86 server market and are followed by HP and IBM. In India it has been HP, IBM and Dell. In the last three to four quarters it’s been HP and then Dell. In the last quarter, we became number one with a 31% share in revenue terms. In terms of shipments, we missed the top spot by just 160 units. We are not a big player in the tower market and have been concentrating on racks and blades,” said Sathyaseelan PA, Executive Director, Enterprise Solutions, Dell India.
“Our share’s high on x86 but our perception in the enterprise hasn’t been as high. We will position ourselves as an innovator/IP owner rather than as an integrator. We have been known for best-of-breed execution, great customer relationships and possess 25 years of experience in direct sales. Now, we want to go to the core of the data center and that’s not about compute alone, you have to have storage and networking too,” he said.
As far as enterprise storage goes, the company has amassed quite a portfolio over the course of the past few years acquiring EqualLogic and Compellent to add to its existing storage brands.
When it came to storage, Dell traditionally had a relationship with EMC where it distributed the latter’s products. The EqualLogic acquisition was a sign that Dell was no longer satisfied to distribute another vendor’s products. That move proved to be quite successful. When Dell acquired EqualLogic, it was a $300 mn business. Today it’s a billion dollar play.
The company’s current storage line-up consists of PowerVault for DAS and NAS. Exanet for file-based storage—it is integrated with EqualLogic (iSCSI) and PowerVault. It acquired Compellent for block storage.
When it comes to storage, Dell’s sales pitch is that it talks about a lifecycle. “When you scale out with Compellent, you don’t have to buy a new controller every time you add some drives. The hardware remains the same for a generation,” added Sathyaseelan.
UST Global is a Dell customer that’s on Compellent and it has integrated its entire storage set-up into a vast SAN environment provisioning for various applications from that pool.
To build up its storage business, the way it has its server line, Dell is going after customers with whom it has already established relationships and is cross selling storage to them. It’s also selling the newer, Dell-owned, product lines to customers who might have bought EMC products from it in the past.
“We have a long way to go in external storage. We are in the sixth place today. Getting to the fourth place by the end of 2012 would make us happy,” said Sathyaseelan.
“In storage, hardware acquisition forms the lesser cost; it’s the cost of management that’s higher,” he added arguing that Compellent had brought down the management cost through auto tiering, scale out etc.
“We also want a reasonable presence in the networking market,” he added.
In terms of applications, there has been some uptake for Exchange 2010, good progress on the VDI front and Cloud initiatives are happening. The physical consolidation of data centers, data center refresh, mission-mode projects as well as state initiatives in the government and HPCC in research are some other areas that are hot.
Acquiring AppAssure gave Dell a play in backup as well. The trends here are that people are shifting to disk-to-disk backup on account of regulatory compliance. “When it comes to security agencies and projects such as CCTNS, the law mandates that information retrieval has to happen in one or two hours. If you have a determined standard for retrieval of two hours or less, tape won’t do,” he concluded.
Dell’s also jumped onto the converged infrastructure bandwagon with server-storage-networking in stacks that are optimized for VDI or the Cloud etc. “We work with ISVs and certify it as a stack and go to market with that. This is happening a lot in telecom. Even in banking, there are applications for which customers do this. In the mid-market, we are exploring opportunities with Microsoft. They have a data warehousing solution.”
Dell also provides equipment to OEMs like Honeywell who sell solutions in the market. It also has a big channel play.
When it comes to industry verticals, Dell’s been targeting the Public Sector in a big way for the last three years.
Another big area is that of manufacturing/large conglomerates. Then there’s IT/ITES, the company’s traditional stronghold where it has a distinct advantage. The SMB segment is also a focus area for Dell.
