Dell has launched its India design centre for its storage technologies and realigned its domestic R&D unit.

This India facility will focus on developing software, integrating aspects involving back-up of emails and related storage in addition to working on upcoming technologies in that area, a strategy somewhat similar to its rivals such as EMC and Dell.

The development centre, in turn, would help Dell to being products faster to the market, an area where the company has been struggling since the past couple of years, according to industry watchers.

“The India centre is well positioned since we already have a strong presence in our servers and networking businesses involving and storage now will compliment them,” said Alan Atkinson, Vice-President of Dell’s storage division, told Business Line . The company, which after almost nine months of boardroom battle with some shareholders, has decided go private.

Further, Pete Korce, also a Vice-President of Dell’s storage division, said the Bangalore centre will consist of storage architects who will work with its other R&D centres in the US and Israel. This division globally has around 5,000 employees out of which 1,000 of them worked on storage-related technologies.

When asked about the number of such professionals to be hired in India, the company did not give numbers but said that it will be in ‘hundreds’.

Dell said that it will continue its investments in India. So far, in the last 10 years, the company has invested $35 million and bulk of it has been made in the last 5-6 years, according to Rudramuni B, Executive Director and Head, Dell India R&D centre.

Competitors such as EMC, IBM HP and others also have strong India presence and work in similar areas that Dell operates in. “We will not comment on competition but from an organisation point of view, we want to bring together all three service lines and get our products faster to the market,” said Atkinson.

In the fiscal year 2012, enterprise solutions and services business grew six per cent to $18.6 billion, and was nearly 30 per cent of its revenue.

>venkatesh.ganesh@thehindu.co.in

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