Cloud - The "Big Question" for SMBs

How important is the SMB vertical for Dell?

SMBs are one of the most important areas for Dell's growth. India by far is one of the prime markets in the APAC region. There are over 1 mn SMBs in India having more than 1.5mn PCs, and this is a huge market to score and grow. At Dell, we are heavily investing in terms of introducing new products and strategies.

What are the key requirement and challenges of Indian SMBs?

We don't see any difference in the requirement and challenges that the SMBs have in India compared to the US, France and China. In fact, they all have similar pain points. Essentially, SMBs are facing issues in terms of lesser number of IT people, lack of IT expertise, lack of an automated IT environment, managing explosion of data, and security. These are the common issues across SMBs in different countries. Hence, our approach is to address the pain points and bring solutions that suit their needs, and fix their problem which would help them grow their business.

What are the new solutions that Dell has launched for the SMB market?

On April 14, globally, we rolled out new enterprise solutions for SMBs which are catering to storage, networking and servers. Today, most of the SMBs are running desktops as servers which do not bring reliability and performance, so our new products are made in order to cater to such environment and need.

For Dell, servers, storage and networking are the growth engines and we are continuously investing on these technologies. 2011 will be a busy year for Dell, as we have planned at least 20 products for SMBs. We expect the SMB segment to contribute 35% to Dell's overall revenue globally in the next 3 years.

In your view, how are SMBs catching up on cloud computing as compared to traditional products?

Cloud computing is still a big question mark for a lot of SMBs. We feel that there is a lack of understanding on what benefits cloud computing can bring to SMBs. There are also too many marketing buzzwords associated with cloud computing, however, the reality is that there do exist solutions which make sense for SMBs to invest on cloud computing. But, there is a grave need to explain in detail the benefits of cloud computing to SMBs.

What are the major business segments of Dell, and how are they contributing to the overall revenue?

Today, Dell has four major business segments-large enterprise, public, small and medium business, and consumer business which contributes 40%, 27% and 33% (SMB and consumer together) respectively to the overall revenue. The company's global revenue for FY 2010-11 is $61.49 bn as compared to $52.90 bn in FY 2009-10.

After Dell moved from direct model to indirect channel, how has been the experience?

Our direct business continues to grow, wherein our indirect business, primarily through channels in most of the countries is doing well. Moreover to protect our partners, we are making sales transformation. We are also evaluating on how we can redesign the number of accounts any account manager could have.

What steps have been taken to increase the channel partners and customers base?

For Dell, channel partners are the key growth engine for the company's success. Our effort is to bring partner centric policies. In this direction, we have floated Global Commercial Channels to serve as a single-point contact for our ever growing commercial channels. Other than that, we have recently rolled out Equipment Finance Program in partnership with Macquarie in India.

For customers, we are introducing Customer Advisory Council. Besides, for the first time in India, we are taking 20 SMB customers to Goa to get their feedback and understand their challenges so that we can redesign our products accordingly.