Dell Technologies sees robust domestic demand for IT

Domestic IT consumption has healthy tailwinds despite the prevalent nervousness of how macroeconomics are playing out globally, said Manish Gupta, vice president and general manager of infrastructure solutions group, Dell Technologies India.

"We see robust demand, and adoption of new workloads by customers in India," Gupta told EnterpriseStory. Enterprises are having the intent to secure themselves from cyberattacks, and boards are supporting investments towards modernising the technology infrastructure, he added.

Dell Technologies counts IT and IT-enabled services as a bulk of its domestic business in infrastructure solutions. This segment includes system integrators like TCS and Wipro, startups, as well as global development centres of Fortune 500 enterprises in India.

In the past couple of years, the telecom industry has also been a large customer, as data workloads grew exponentially during the nationwide lockdowns because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gupta explained. The 5G network rollouts will be another tailwind for the telecom sector in coming years, he added.

The pandemic also ushered in a wave of enterprises with less than 1,000 employees that want to digitise. Dell Technologies India classifies these as 'Medium Businesses' (MB), which has been its fastest-growing segment.

Towards this end, Dell Technologies carved out a separate sales organisation, to manage partner engagement and build awareness of its products and services.

"We started investing in the mid market, and the charter is to spread wide, improve the coverage, add more customers into the fold more in terms of acquiring customers and spreading to the tier-2 cities," said Sandeep Dutta, Director - Storage, Platform and Solutions, Dell Technologies India.

The distribution partners who are the link between Dell Technologies and MBs play a crucial role in terms of implementation and system integration, Gupta noted. Services and manufacturing businesses form a large chunk of the MB business. It is a fallacy that MBs are at the lower end of technology adoption, he added.

Dell Technologies hosted a customer event in Bengaluru on July 13 to launch its array of software-driven storage solutions to drive intelligence, automation, cyber-resiliency and multi-cloud flexibility.

Businesses must focus on upgrading mission-critical infrastructure, Gupta said, attributing the need to changes like remote working, higher volume of data transactions, use of newer applications, and increased IT workloads across industries.

The Dell PowerStore, for instance, enables businesses to get insights from data residing at any cloud environment, the company said. Similarly, the upgrades in its PowerMax architecture have cyber-resiliency advancements, including cyber vaults for traditional and mainframe deployments.

From planning infrastructure on-premise a decade ago, customers moved to the public cloud. As the industry matured, customers realised that it is going to be hybrid cloud, Gupta said.

"Customers will continue to live in a multi-cloud world. Our innovations are focused on how to give customers the best experience on multi cloud, and how they can get the best enterprise-grade software on premise as well as with a hyperscaler. It is about collaborating, and keeping the customer at the centre," Gupta explained.