“Dell is becoming the local SI partner offering cost-effective, scalable solutions and participating in the SMB’s growth”

Amit Midha, President, Dell Greater China, South Asia and President & Corporate VP, Dell APJ SMB, Dell (China) Company Ltd., spoke to Akhtar Pasha about Dell’s transition from a pure-play product supplier to the SMB’s end-to-end local SI partner with scalable, cost-effective solutions

Amit Midha

Looking at Dell’s recent business restructuring, which were the strategic overhaul efforts that proved effective in enhancing your performance worldwide and in India in CY 2009?

Dell divided its global business into four groups in order to better serve its customers—large enterprise group, public group, SMB group and a consumer group. The results have been quite encouraging. The SMB sector accounted for about 25% of Dell's business in China, which is the second-largest market for us. We have seen a 25% growth in overall business and a large part of the growth is attributed to Consumer and SMBs also called CSMB.

The addressable SMB segment is very big in matured markets such as China and Korea including India. We feel that India is an under-penetrated market as far as SMBs are concerned, particularly very small businesses with 50-100 employees.

The way SMBs with 50-200 employees used to buy PCs is changing. Most technology decisions of SMB firms are taken by owners, which are non-standard and are more transaction oriented—meaning that they call up their friends to make the technology decision and take the help of local SI partners who supply them with the hardware and software pieces. They face complexities in managing servers, distributed storage, networking and messaging. Additionally, they want to cut the cost of managing IT infrastructure and optimize their assets. This is where we are finding new opportunities.

A big chunk of Dell’s revenues continues to be accounted for by large enterprise accounts. What inroads have you made in the SMB market during CY 2009?

Enterprise business continues to see traction, but we are focusing on the SMB segment heavily by changing the perception that we are just a product company. We are engaging in IT infrastructure projects through consulting services, which we never attempted before and are finding success. For example, an Indian steel manufacturer first bought 50 laptops and 10 servers from us. After thorough consultation, we got the deal for designing and setting up their IT infrastructure and the client was quite amazed by our consulting capability to fulfill the end-to-end requirement. A boiler manufacturer was another example. They did not have any prior IT experience and but were looking for the export market. We started with supplying hardware mainly PCs. Later they realized that we could set-up their IT infrastructure including applications and networking in a cost-effective way. We are becoming the local SI partner for SMBs with the difference being that we are offering a more cost-effective scalable, automated and integrated solution so that they do not need to run behind multiple vendors for support. They can eliminate multiple vendor engagement with one Dell SLA.

How is Dell reaching out to SMBs?

We did a series of new product launches to lure SMBs. The Vostro A-Series business notebook, based on ULV, at sub Rs 28,000 was clearly designed for emerging markets such as India. The Adamo XPS became the world’s thinnest laptop marketed to SMBs.

We are also bringing modular services for distributed end-point device management for virus and malware control. We would centrally deploy and enforce Symantec and McAfee anti-virus software and updates for distributed PCs—whether or not they are on the corporate network for a price of just one or two dollars a month on a subscription basis.

Which are the top technologies where SMBs would be investing in 2010?

While the scale of operations for SMBs could be small, their pain points and business challenges are the same as those of enterprises. SMBs want to reduce capital expenditure as much as possible and optimize their IT infrastructure to reduce management costs. At the same time they need scalable automated solutions that can keep pace with their business. In this context, I would rate ERP, servers, storage, virtualization, client devices, security and video conferencing to be the top technologies where SMBs would be investing in 2010.