To Transform Digitally, You Must Transform Your IT: David Webster, President, Dell EMC APJ - Enterprise Sales And Customer Operations
Dell and EMC came together two years ago. Fast forward to today, the merged entity has had a positive progress. David Webster, President, Dell EMC APJ - Enterprise Sales and Customer Operations, in an exclusive interaction with Sarabjeet Kaur, BW CIOWORLD, tells how Dell EMC has grown, its customers are getting value from its solutions and its strategy to help its customers transform post the merger. David also shares how businesses can thrive while facing a lot of changes going on in the industry in the competitive and business landscape mainly because of the change in digital strategies. Excerpts:
We have got from the edge to the core to the cloud capability. We can go from a client device or a personal computer to all the way into a data center. So we can help customers with the workforce, IT infrastructure and digital transformation as well as security and data protection. These four transformations are what the customers really like. Our customers are business outcome focused and not product centric so they are delivering value. I think we are hitting on a problem that our customers have and need to change, therefore, they see our solutions as enablers for them to change.
Dell technologies in India is growing really well, quarter on quarter and year on year. We are taking market share in personal computers, service, and storage systems. IDC data tells us that we are growing really well taking the market share. That is just reflecting in the customers’ interest in transformation stories, value proposition and business impact which flows through product management.
A lot of businesses merge and take the cost out but our strategy was merge and grow. The synergies between the two companies have enabled us to accelerate growth in service, storage, personal computers, and networks. It has been more of a synergy leveraged growth strategy than a cost reduction strategy. So we have actually increased sales, pre-sales, and services headcount in India all because of the customer strategy of wanting us to do more and being involved in more things.
India is a very important market for us globally. It has a very highly educated population, a geography which is very large and technology can play a very important role in helping India’s economy. If you think about how people used to go to work but now work from wherever they are. I believe, because of geography and urban challenges around transportation in India, the ability to work from anywhere is really important. So our products and technologies applied to workforce transformation are really helping the country. We see it as a very important market because of the potential, the scale of intellectual capacity and the government policies which are very open and focused on encouraging business investments. So we see India as a very high potential and large scale market. In the APJ context, India and China have the two largest populations in the world and therefore there’s massive potential and a need to modernize the infrastructure. We think we have a lot of value to add there.
Globally, the top three would be government, financial services, and telecommunications. That is very consistent across the world mainly because these industries have large customer bases. They are infrastructure-centric, having a large population with which they want to connect and engage with. Also, these industries are leading around the use of technology. So the customer experience for financial services companies is a very big driver of their technology strategy. Telecommunications companies also want to provide additional services such as 4G, 5G and more. So they have the customer base which drives the need for technology and the access to data and therefore they invest in that. The government also obviously has its citizens to serve. So the government, financial services, and telecommunications are the top three industries for Dell EMC and they all contribute significantly to the Dell EMC revenue.
Yes, it has increased and it is growing. Dell EMC has been working on key government initiatives – Aadhaar card infrastructure, GST, Niti Aayog etc. In fact, in the past one year, we have had transformational deals across all major sectors such as Telecom, BFSI etc. As the government evolves and wants to increase and improve services to the population, technology plays a very important role in that and we think that the government recognizes the value of Dell EMC as a portfolio to help them do that. We have got a lot of different states and national government initiatives underway around various things like smart cities which enables the government to think about their future a lot more differently because of what technology can bring.
To transform digitally, you must transform your IT. There is a connection between digital transformation and IT transformation. To enable a company to transform digitally, the underlying infrastructure must be transformed first. So the sequence is by modernizing your IT, automating it and changing how you operate it. Post that you become more efficient and you reduce cost. When the cost is reduced, you can take that money you’ve saved and spend it on digital transformation.
I think all governments in the world recognize that digital is really important. Different governments have different philosophies about it. I trust that the Indian government has a very good perspective of what are the things that they should be doing, where they are going and our job is to support and enable that.
Digital Transformation puts technology at the heart of an organization’s products, services and operations to help accelerate the business and competitively differentiate itself in order to improve the experience for its customers. This is achieved through the use of smarter products, data analytics and continuous improvement of products and services through the use of software.
