Philip A. Davis, Vice President, Enterprise Solutions, APJ, Dell, talks to Mehak Chawla about Dell’s India strategy, cloud ambitions, security concerns over public cloud and opportunities for domestic players. Excerpts…
What are the key trends transforming the enterprises with the advent of cloud and mobility?
If we take a look at India and the APJ market there are four key trends- transform, connect, inform and protect. As a transformation drive, we have over the last couple of years seen cloud become more prevalent with growing expectations rise from how a data center should act or react. On the connect side there’s the increasing move towards multiple mobile devices.Inform is mostly around storage and storage infrastructure. Today, IT departments have more data than ever. Enterprises are moving from managing the deluge of data to making it useful. The final piece is around protecting all of these. We are seeing more intrusions and its getting worse with mobile device. At Dell we are transforming ourselves to provide end to end solutions across these four areas and are making a lot of organic investments as well as inorganic acquisitions to offer more capabilities.
How real are the security concerns with respect to public cloud today?
People think what you can control is more secure and hence, they trust in private environments. But the truth is you don’t control security in a public cloud. Some of the skepticism is related to the models provided by cloud security vendors. These service providers are saying that we shall provide security but there’s no penalty involved if there’s a breach. This lack of accountability is worrying and we should see more security metrics getting evolve in the near future.
In private cloud, the key differentiation is dedicated hardware for the users. So, in public cloud a customer has a logical separation and in private they have a logical as well as a physical separation. This seems to taking some burden off the minds of CIOs and CSOs.
How much cloud-opportunity is left for domestic service providers against the global players?
There is undoubtedly a great cloud opportunity for end-to-end players. A key about cloud is the economies of scale. The money spent on supporting the infrastructure doesn’t go up as fast as the size of infrastructure does and the domestic players can capitalize on this factor.
Another thing that can work for domestic players is the data sovereignty concept. It’s already an issue and will only become bigger. That’s where most of the global players will face problem because they won稚 be able to guarantee where the data is residing within country’s borders. This is a big opportunity for Indian cloud companies. Secondly, it depends on the application type, speed and latency. In such scenarios, being close can have a defined advantage. The local costing model and resources that these Indian players can provide can never be substituted by international companies.
As far as global players are concerned, Indian service providers are trying to learn from them.
How is Dell charting out its growth strategy in the coming year?
We will continue to invest in enterprise business both in terms of acquisitions and expansion. Our enterprise solutions and services now share about a third of Dell’s overall revenues and over half of overall profits. We want to move towards becoming an end to end player in this field. Our focus is basically on two areas – how to improve TCO and how to make customers move from a 徒eeping lights onstage to actually innovating within their IT environments.
India is our largest site outside of US and is a very crucial geography for us. Every function of Dell is present in India. We are also hiring actively in our hubs like Chennai center. We are talking about over 1200 R&D seats in India. We have also seen some interesting customers in India like Yash Raj Films and USHA international who are migrating their IT environments using our services.
What are the key areas of investment for Dell’s Enterprise Solutions Group in India?
When it comes to cloud, there are a few places where we are putting our investments. One is in helping customers get to private cloud. Second is the services to help them get there. We can do the consulting as well as the architectural implementation for physical migration. We are actually seeing plenty of migrations happening in India. Recently, there has been a significant effort to move to newer versions of SAP.
