While rolling out cutting-edge enterprise solutions, the company has been focussing on innovation, simplified and modern infrastructure, and reducing costs for customers
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“We have introduced leading edge enterprise solutions in our cloud portfolio, which will help businesses in Digital India ride the growth.”
Srinivas Rao,
Senior Director, System Engineering,
Dell Technologies, India
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The Cloud industry has been gaining momentum over the last several years. But the Pandemic and the ensuing shift to online operations and massive adoption of work-from-home-culture and online learning gave it a much needed shot in the arm. As the India market remains in the eye of a major digital transformation buoyed by a tech-centred Union Budget, SME Channels embarks upon recording the voices of the who’s who of the Cloud scape.
As part of our effort to make the voices of major cloud players heard by the channel community, we have brought in this for you as first of a series of Cloud Predictions by major vendors.
Here, in a special interaction with SME Channels, Srinivas Rao, Senior Director, System Engineering, Dell Technologies, India, reveals his organization’s strategy for growing the cloud industry, his predictions for the industry in 2022 and his vision and plans for the channel community. Edited excerpts…
The pandemic has forced businesses to take a giant leap to go online. As a leading cloud player, how do you plan to leverage the immense market opportunity created by the pandemic?
The pandemic boosted digital growth in India at an unprecedented scale. With major business processes turning digital, organisations across India adopted online strategies to achieve operations. Most organisations across India have already realised the importance of deriving real-time insights from data and the dynamics of cloud computing in their day-to-day processes. As we move deeper into the data era, it is important to focus on a cloud strategy and move ahead with a data-first mindset.
Dell Technologies is committed to the needs of our customers who are willing to take their digital transformation goals to the next level. We have introduced leading edge enterprise solutions in our cloud portfolio, which will help businesses in Digital India ride the growth. Our customers want simplicity, agility, and a consistent experience to manage their data across multiple cloud environments. Catering to the same, the key areas we have been focusing on are – innovation, simplified and modern infrastructure, and reducing costs for organisations keeping with the market trends.
As a major cloud player, what market trends do you foresee in 2022? What major channel trends for cloud would you forecast for the year 2022?
As the dynamics of the organisations change with Industry 4.0 and rapid move to digital processes, we foresee that The multi-cloud future is now.
The IT world understands the benefits of the cloud. But as cloud models mature, it isn’t public cloud or private cloud – it’s multi-cloud. Next year, more than 90% of enterprises are expected to deploy workloads on a mix of private clouds, public clouds, SaaS and existing infrastructure. The multi-cloud future is now, and the architects of data management, artificial intelligence and machine learning will depend on seamless access to multiple clouds. Those who can access multiple clouds, with the right workloads on each cloud, will have a strategic advantage.
A new Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Dell Technologies reveals that 83% of organisations have adopted a multi-cloud approach or plan to within the next 12 months. With our sustained investments in an expanded multi-cloud portfolio and a vibrant cloud ecosystem, we will enable organisations to improve spend predictability, transparency, and scalability.
A consistent cloud experience wherever technology is deployed and developed – whether in a data centre, in the public cloud, or at the edge- will be the strategic data control point for the multi-cloud world.
Please shed some light on your cloud offerings. What is the USP of your offerings?
Dell Technologies’ cloud solutions help organisations manage complexities of the cloud environment with ease. The cloud market in India is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 24% and reach a value of almost USD 11 million by 2025. With our solutions, businesses moving to an IaaS (Infrastructure-as-s-Solution) and (Software-as-a-Service) SaaS models will have the edge over competitors.
With our wide range of services, businesses will have the advantage of quick deployment of services, data science insights for the IT leadership, real-time problem solving and the support of Dell Technologies’ team throughout all operations.
VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail (VCF): Fully integrated Dell Technologies HCI system that’s jointly engineered with VMware and delivered as a turnkey option. It offers greater flexibility and agility, and eliminates complexities in managing aging infrastructure, and resolving storage size and scalability limitations.
VMware Cloud on Dell Technologies: DataCenter-as-a-Service that’s offered as a fully managed, subscription-based service for data centre and edge locations. The new Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering gives organisations the ability to move workloads across multiple cloud environments and scale resources quickly with predictable pricing and transparent costs.
Through our strategic ecosystem approach, customers can securely store, access, and consume data wherever it is created and consume cloud services anywhere their business needs it.
What all a channel partner needs to have to adopt cloud business and what are the steps to start cloud practice?
Channel partners or cloud solution providers must research the challenges faced by their potential customers. This includes understanding their needs, to root investments in the right direction. Channel providers must also assess the infrastructure that needs to be ready for enterprises to effortlessly adopt their cloud solutions.
The next wise step is to develop a launch strategy and get in touch with the right cloud vendors. Cloud vendors ought to be reliable, efficient and economically viable. A significant factor to consider here is also scalability. Channel partners must ensure that their business is scalable, and all variables are measured correctly to scale up the business whenever required.
Listening and responding to customers before, during and after the delivery of the solution is a fundamental way forward for partners.
Would you please brief us on the kind of service support you extend to your channel partners? What sort of pre as well as post-sales support do you offer to your partners?
At Dell Technologies, our endeavour has always been to provide unwavering success to our channel partners. This is why we continually work towards enhancing our Partner Programs every year.
As part of this year’s program, whether a partner is a Solution Provider, Cloud Service Provider, an OEM partners or any combination of these tracks, they have a more streamlined experience as our partner in 2022. We offer an incentive structure with regional rebates that is consistent across tracks. We have enhanced a multitude of other parameters including our tech refresh processes, licence resell and rebate processes, among others to help our channel partners grow and gain access to one of the industry’s most comprehensive portfolios.
Since cloud is a tech-intensive product, it requires proper skilling. Please detail us on the training programs offered by you to upskill your partners.
Our partner programs are enhanced each year, after extensive research and analysis only to provide our channel partners with the right kind of comprehensive training and upskilling. Through our education services, we upskill all our partners with customized training sets to ensure our partners can build, manage, and operate our end-to-end technology solutions on their own. This is a big incentive for partners to align with Dell Technologies.
