All our innovations are customer centric

—Ravi Pendekanti
Vice President, Server Product Marketing, Dell

Ravi Pendekanti, Vice President, Server Product Marketing, Dell says his job is to ensure that the company is able to look ahead where the trends are and make sure that it is there. He takes us through the current transition in the server landscape led by new technologies, and talks about how Dell’s redefined strategies very much revolve around its customers. And unlike some of its competitors, its mantra will not be to split or merge, but to stay together and evolve. Excerpts

What are the key factors that drive Dell’s server strategy today?

We have a huge focus on innovation today more than any time in the company’s history. I still recall how we went from virtualization to the whole cloud space. That is a big thing that we have noticed and we are watching everything that goes with big data and analytics. I think it is an area for us to go back and look at. Mobility of course is huge for us. We are starting to look at the huge potency of customers who look at the viability of public cloud. I think the concerns of security are still huge and then there are also connectivity issues and that’s where we see private cloud still being a predominant factor.

Can you take us through the transition that Indian server market has gone through, in terms of the technology changes that have happened in the last five-six years and the expectations of the customers

One of the things we have seen in the last five years is that the enterprise market has certainly matured a lot. If I have to drive an analogy, I think it is like the telecom industry, I don’t think we went from having the fibre and stuff to maturing to wireless. But we had a pretty interesting jump in the server space and the reason why we see this big transition is because, I think there are three major things that are all relevant to the Indian market. A lot of customers are talking about their cloud strategy. I don’t think I heard cloud strategy resonate as much in the past. Cloud today is a big norm. But I think it’s the private cloud that is going to take off much stronger than the public cloud.

I think big data analytics is also something we have seen quite a bit and I think this is where we see the future ready IT, as we call it, and the traditional IT coming together.

Customers are looking at more of solutions than the individual stacks and honestly no better time for us to be in exactly the same space, giving them the end-to-end solutions and that is something resonating very strongly with the customers. Earlier there were discussions wherein the customers would talk about a proper point product such as this server or this storage. That has changed significantly.

I remember VDI used to exist in many different avatars as still is and it was one of those things that you would go and talk but customers were not deploying those solutions. Today VDI is something that is getting deployed at a whole lot of places, if you look at banking, education all those places customers are going and deploying VDI. It is not about saying am I saving this amount of money, it is also about how do I keep my data secure, how I can bring more efficiency in management, how do I share the right content with the right employee, in this case it’s a different world. The way customers are approaching IT today has changed significantly in the last five to seven years.

What has been the change in the strategy for a service provider, how has it evolved over this period of time?

If you look at us as an organization, we are really building and we have over this period built a strong end-to-end capability. That has been our strategy in the last couple of years.

In the cloud space, be it a private cloud strategy, be it a hybrid cloud strategy or a public cloud, we are working with a whole lot of customers to give them solutions across all three types.

The other examples is that of VDI. The moment we talk about VDI, we are the only ones who have got everything in the stack, the WYSE products that we have, we have got the enterprise infrastructure which would compute on servers, storage, networking and we also have the VDI brokers.

Honestly when we talk to the customer from the entire stack, it is one hand that he is shaking rather than going with three different people. The other part and that’s about being open, you know you got to have an open and modulus structure for the customers to build on tomorrow. Those are the basic tenets of what we have been working on.

With reference to service provider strategies, there are few things. In terms of their deployment scenarios, they have changed. They are looking at how they can optimise more efficiently. We have done a pretty elegant job with storage with our 13G wherein we have brought lots of elements closer to compute and likely to see that on the networking side.

Over a period of time, Dell has established itself as one of the leaders in the server market space, so what is the unique positioning for Dell right now?

The unique positioning for Dell is that there is this phrase called “one throat to choke” but I think we got to change that to “one hand to shake”.

We are changing the conversation to becoming more customer centric than becoming more vendor specific which I think is our responsibility as much as the other vendors. And certainly Dell takes pride in saying that we are going to be more solutions led rather than being feature or functionality led.

On the contrary, is there something that your competitors are doing that you would want to replicate?

For us the best practitioners are usually the customers and partners. If you look at what is going on with IBM & Lenovo, they are busy merging. HP is busy splitting. We are the only ones who are busy shipping.

At the end of the day it’s the customers who are riding the pitch. We are customer centric and all our innovations are infact called as customer-centric innovations. So that will be our driving mantra.

I mean the social behavior, the instant gratification community that all of us have become was not the case 10 years ago. So are we going to learn? Yes we are going to learn. Are there things for us to keep evolving ourselves to? I’d say absolutely yes. But I can say it’s from the customers and partners that I can go lay my bets on rather than looking at others. I can’t look around and say, wow! I would like to go and split. We want to stay together and that’s why we want to say one hand to shake. I think it is a much better approach.

Can you outline the three top trends that are going to redefine the Indian server market place?

The three top things, I would go back to the cloud and within cloud I would say private cloud. The next is mobility. I think we are not done with mobility as yet as much as we are with BYOD, and finally I would pick up big data. I think those three are huge.

I am just curious to know that when I talk to CIOs separately, I find that nothing much is happening on the analytics side. That still is in a very nascent stage?

It’s also the kind of organization that you are talking about. Traditional organizations are going through a step by step transition. New age organizations such as ecommerce, etailers, etc, have jumped on the analytics bandwagon very quickly and we have seen a lot of the Diwali sales happen online. So yes there is a path to go there. There are some organizations that are already there.