Dell to help Sri Lanka developfuture-ready enterprises, workforce

By HiyalBiyagamage

Dell recently concluded ‘Dell Future-Ready Solutions 2016’ in Sri Lanka, unveiling a range of new solutions aimed at building future-ready enterprises and workforce. At a media conference to announce these new additions, senior Dell delegates from the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region expressed their views on how Dell’s new solutions will equip businesses with the agility and resilience to keep up with a dynamic marketplace and define the future of the connected workforce.

Dell wants to go the extra mile

Speaking at the event, Dell Sri Lanka Country Manager Roshan Nugawela said that the company will continue to deliver a best-in-class customer experience and their top priority is to ensure that customer needs are met.

“Dell has always been in the process of providing future-driven solutions which matter to customers and help them change the world. Some of the big names in the industry have undergone major organisational transformations but Dell has the ability to pursue a long-term strategy with a 100% customer-focused approach to deliver industry-leading innovations and increasingly standalone as an integrated provider of end-to-end solutions,” Nugawela said.

According to him, IT leaders in Sri Lanka are in search of integrated solutions to boost their legacy enterprise systems and latest technology trends to drive their competitive advantage. In a rapidly-developing business setting, Dell’s future-ready solutions will help local businesses run more efficiently by providing a fast track to fully-converged IT solutions.

“Dell Sri Lanka completed successful five year tenure in Sri Lanka recently. As a company, we haven’t only achieved milestones but set benchmarks to the industry. We have launched some breakthrough initiatives to address multitude of customer requirements and recorded significant growth results while claiming a big chunk of market share in Sri Lanka. We have continued our number one market share position by covering many of the industry verticals. The markets share data from IDC (International Data Corporation) ranks Dell as the number one PC brand in Sri Lanka for consecutive 12 quarters gives a testament of Dell’s brand value in the country,” opined Nugawela.

(According to IDC’s 2Q Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker, Dell was able to secure 35.7% of the overall PC market in Sri Lanka for the year 2015)

Privatisation was a positive move for Dell

Harjeet Singh Rekhi, General Manager for Dell’s South Asia Developing Markets Group (SADMG), spoke about how Dell’s privatisation, which happened in October 2014, changed the entire strategy of the company and how it is affecting Dell’s future endeavours.

“People were curious about what Dell is actually trying to do differently. One of the things that we said at that time was we actually made that decision so that we could make some decisions and move more swiftly in the areas which we felt strongly above. Investment decisions, acquisitions and some of the other thought processes have been made much easier because we were not in the glare of stock markets.

“When the privatisation was closed, we actually got down to work and structured our business into four different business units: enterprise business unit, end-user computing solutions unit which contributes 60% of our revenue, software group which was made from components that we acquired and services business unit which essentially takes care of all the after-market support as well as consulting, deployment and managed services. These four units make Dell a formidable organisation in the globe. We currently operate in 180 countries and we have close to about 100,000 employees and we serve our customers through 145000 partners,” said Harjeet.

Harjeet spoke about how their services business unit can help large organisations to outsource their entire IT network management and how Dell can manage much more than a typical IT help desk scenario for an organisation. In 2009, Dell acquired Perot Systems for a gigantic US$ 3.9 billion in order to become a comprehensive, customer-focused IT-solutions company. The creation of Dell Services happened after the acquisition, by combining what Dell had from Perot as well as what they already had within Dell.  

Harjeet also enlightened the media about the ongoing Dell-EMC acquisition. The deal is valued at roughly $ 67 billion, making it the biggest-ever deal in the technology sector.

“Since we went private, we invested more in research and development and since our acquisition; our patent findings have gone up by 28%. We have launched a range of new products over the last few years and we are proactively in the process of acquiring EMC which is the biggest acquisition of the world ever. This acquisition will maintain the independent partner ecosystems of Dell, EMC, VMware, VCE, Virtustream, RSA, Pivotal and the balance of the Dell and EMC companies. That is what privatisation has helped us to do and these solid decisions would have been otherwise looked at in a negative manner. But the combination of Dell and EMC give us increased ability to serve our customers as the single shop of IT infrastructure and solutions that does not exist.

“The world is moving towards stripping companies to become much smaller. Dell is doing the exact opposite. We are trying to build far more capabilities under one roof so that every customer can be served with the same amount of zeal that they would expect from a company like Dell,” added Harjeet further.

A disruption of technologies

Director for Strategy and Transformation for Dell Commercial Sales and Enterprise Solutions for APJ, Martin Yates, talked to the audience about the current digital transformation and he emphasised that none of us would be able to escape the magnitude of the whole process. Martin said that this transformation is called the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ whereas Martin addressed it as the ‘industrialisation of information and devices.’

“The world we see is now in a complete disruption. For example, the biggest hotel company does not own a single hotel room or does not operate a single hotel. If you take Uber, the biggest taxi company in the world, doesn’t own a single taxi or a driver. It is just an API economy, a software platform that is worth US$ 40 billion. The world is under complete transformation and at the center of that sits the cloud. It is a separate eco system that wraps around us with millions and billions of data. This explosion of data is bringing devices much closer to the cloud which literally paves way to Internet of Things (IoT).

“When we look at our products and services, we are constantly thinking about the challenges of our customers. We talk and discuss with them on a daily basis on different challenges such as how to improve customer experience, what is the new big trend, how do you improve your people, how do you bring technology to improve people efficiency etc. our ability to beat the competition is really important. We need to be faster and we need better systems, platforms to do that,” Yates told the audience.

He also talked about the importance of innovation and the ability to drive innovation is a key factor in doing business in modern days.

“We see numerous innovations coming out today.  To beat that, you need to keep your pace with innovation. While doing that, you need to keep in mind of security concerns. You hear about hacking, analysing CCTV camera visuals and all these terrible security malpractices. You need to know what is happening out there and you should know where to draw the line. As we interact with our governments, we need to cross-check whether correct e-Government systems are in place and whether they function properly. Dell as a company looks up to these challenges and tries to rectify issues by understanding pain points of customers, enterprises and governments.”

He mentioned that Dell has entered a period where businesses are redefining their use of IT to drive new business rather than just support it. “We are entering a more dynamic application driven phase of datacentre modernisation and agility delivered by the software-defined datacentre. Dell is right at the centre, having all the pieces and partnerships that make this value real so I find this an exciting time in cloud evolution.”

Innovation is Intel’s lifeblood

Intel Sri Lanka Country Business Manager Indika De Zoysa addressed the gathering on how enterprises are rapidly changing with future-ready solutions and he spoke about how Intel’s powerful microprocessors which are made out of silicon enable Dell’s portfolio of servers, storages and datacentres.

“50 years ago, Gordon Moore, one of Intel’s founders, predicted that the number of transistors dense integrated circuit will be doubled approximately every two years. After 50 years, it is still happening and we now ship 14 nm microprocessors and Intel’s 10 nm microprocessor is ready to be shipped by the end of this year. Innovation is Intel’s life blood I would say and over the past 50 years, our engineers have worked hard to bring the microprocessor with improved performance and capabilities. Starting from a smartphone to a complex server, Intel’s microprocessor has helped these devices to fully utilise their capabilities and optimise them to perfection so that consumers can experience the best of features in a device,” said De Zoysa.

De Zoysa also said that the globe has activated its disruptive mode and Intel is working tirelessly to fulfil the needs of customers to face the future through their upcoming products.

“Ten to 15 years back, it was a computer-centric environment. We were looking at digitising things to increase the productivity. It was more like how to connect the entire infrastructure. Then it moved to the network-centric environment and industries were able to reduce their network through better connectivity. Now it has become human-centric. Now you have to fulfil customer requirements so you need faster service delivery. At the end of the day, it is all about agility, automation and efficiency.”

“Teaming up with Dell, we are bringing our advanced performance-driven processors into Dell’s server, networking and storage solutions, driving the company’s goal to serve a dynamic marketplace and a connected workforce with the help of future-ready enterprise solutions,” De Zoysa said.

Apart from these speakers, Dell SADMG Head of Enterprise Solutions, Venkatesh Murali, Dell Regional Director for Cloud Computing in APJ, Terry Burgess and Dell South Asia and Korea Regional Head for Consumer Channels, Lackshmindra Fernando were also present at the media briefing.

New additions to the Dell portfolio

The Dell PowerEdge FX portfolio, an important building block for developing agile datacentres, will now include three new modules to offer enterprises even more options for changing application demands. This gives customers even more ability to add or swap IT building blocks into a 2U converged infrastructure chassis. Dell also announced the expansion of its 13th generation PowerEdge servers including the PowerEdge R930, Dell’s most powerful server specifically designed for the most demanding enterprise applications. This features up to 72 processing cores of Intel Xeon E7-8800/4800 v3 family of processors.

Several new storage offerings designed to help businesses and organisations were also announced. The new Dell Storage SCv2000 Series and the PS6610 Series will allow customers to standardise on a common platform, helping them save time, management costs and operational overhead. These arrays will also support critical business applications and are ideal for customers with large data repository requirements.

The new Dell products and services cover a wide range of datacentre areas as well including some of the highest-performing, highly scalable datacentre solutions which also includes new Dell Storage SC Series software, Dell Data Protection suite, Dell Application Modernisation Portfolio from Dell Services and new Dell ProDeploy Enterprise Suite.

Pix by Lasantha Kumara