Government Is The Single Biggest User Of IT

Dell recently launched its year-long outreach program in support of the government’s Digital India vision. The first of the series of events started off at Hyderabad. On the sidelines of the event, Raman Bountra, Business Leader, Government Sales, Dell India spoke to Dataquest about Dell’s unique capabilities in addressing the technology needs of the government. Excerpts

To extend its support to the government’s Digital India initiative, Dell has announced an outreach program in partnership with Cyber- Media Group under the banner 'CMR-Dell Government Connect Deliberation Forum 2015'. The year-long series of Dell-sponsored roundtable discussions, conferences, presentations to stakeholders, newsletters, public relations, and advertising campaigns will see Dell reaching out to its partners across the length and breadth of India. Dell will also educate its stakehold- ers about the role of technology in nation building and achieving critical governance goals. The recently held Hyderabad event saw participation of nearly 100 delegates from major ministries and depart- ments of the state governments of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, and Public Sector Enterprises (PSEs). In an interaction during the event, Bountra tells us about government’s heightened interest in technology adoption and how Dell is geared to cash in on the opportunity.

How do you see government as a vertical—what are some of the unique differentiators?

At a fundamental level, I don’t see a big difference be- tween government and say BFSI. But having said that, government does have some unique differentiators, as we need to factor in scale and sheer size of its operations. Probably government is the single biggest end user of IT. It’s got specific laid down processes and I agree projects have a long lifecycle, because of its size of implementation. For instance, if I can give an example, the Digital India project, the government is pursuing, has the mandate to cover more than 2 lakh gram panchayats. That gives you a sense of scale and deployment dynamics and specific traits of this vertical. Selling to government is certainly not easy. It’s an eco-system-based approach where multiple vendors, partners, solutions, and services come into play. This clearly gives a sense on how diverse this space is and we are extremely bullish on this vertical.

How is Dell approaching the government business and what is your sweet spot?

Well, our sweet spot is end-to-end capabilities. Whether it is a requirement for a PC or creating a computing infra- structure for datacenters—we have the product, depth, and expertise. Moreover, we have been in this vertical for a while and we understand how it works. So clearly, our domain expertise coupled with state-of-the-art products gives us the distinct edge over competition. Dell believes that technology is a prerequisite to trans- form the country, its businesses, the quality of life of its citizens, and enable better governance and government services. Our objective is to create awareness among decision makers, IT departments and their workforce on the need to build robust, flexible, and secure solutions to serve the emerging needs of central and state government organizations, as well as public sector enterprises.

How do you see government adopting IT—are they ramping up fast?

Absolutely. I see a sense of urgency and innovation happening in many state and central government departments. They clearly want to improve the operational efficiency and bring in more transparency by strategically leveraging IT. There is hectic activity going on in the G2G side and they are exploring all the latest technologies, software and hardware—from cloud to latest servers to productivity suites. We believe that vendors like Dell have a huge potential being part of this transformation that is happening in the government.