IT research firm IDC's PC market review for September quarter notes that large enterprises have responded to improving global cues by ramping up IT infrastructure spends, resulting in improved traction, particularly for desktop PCs. Incidentally, the IDC India quarterly PC tracker for Q3 calendar year 2010 ranks Dell in the numero uno spot for overall PC sales (notebooks and desktops taken together) with an increased market share of 16.7 per cent.
Vikas Bhonsle, General Manager, India Large Enterprise operations - Dell India, believes that the industry is at an inflection point where virtualisation, mobility, cloud computing, storage requirements, digital home, personalisation, ubiquitous data access and security concerns are fundamentally changing the way people use technology.
eWorld caught up with him to discuss the industry performance for 2010 and expectations from 2011. Excerpts:
Dell has achieved the number one position in the India PC market. We have gained considerable market share in both categories — desktop and notebooks.
Overall, we have seen a return to growth, and though companies continue to be careful with their technology spends, businesses are finding out that they can no longer postpone technology updates. It is this trend that we see carrying on in the year ahead.
Given concerns around business continuity, data protection and return on investment (ROI), customers are definitely looking to make investments.
But what is imperative is how we help our customers leverage key technology trends such as cloud, SaaS, virtualisation and storage for an optimal ROI.
What fuelled the growth in 2010…Was it the enterprises buying or consumers category. With regard to enterprises, which verticals chose to aggressively spend on computers this year?
We continue to see strong growth across many of the large enterprise segments, including manufacturing, telecom and BFSI. In medium enterprises, segments such as animation and Value-Added Services (for telecom) are among the key drivers. We also see strong growth across segments such as media and online companies.
Demand continues to come in from SMB and consumer segments. We are seeing an explosion of unstructured data such as audio and digital images, combined with email, as the primary means of communication. That is challenging SMBs to manage, control, back up and archive their data.
New technology trends continue to drive the market. As virtualisation has become mainstream, it is being deployed in server, storage, networking as well as client environments.
By far, the most visible adoption of virtualisation technology is happening in servers, from the largest UNIX servers down to the smallest volume system. For mid-sized businesses, it is being used as a tool for consolidation, a means to reduce space and power requirements and recently, as a way to bring business continuity to a larger part of an organisation's IT infrastructure.
Where do you see enterprise budgets for 2011 (higher than 2010 or lower). Which sectors will lead the pack in PC buying in 2011?
We believe there is significant headroom for growth across all business units — large enterprises, public (government, education), small & medium business and consumer. Even as companies focus on growing their business, they will strive for cost-efficiency and scalability to compete on a global scale. With increased connectivity, 3G rollout, proliferation of different kinds of connected devices and growth of social networking, we will see more and more people coming online for professional and personal purposes and these will drive growth and penetration in the market.
We will continue to focus across all key verticals while simultaneously looking to further increase our product as well as service coverage across India.
Most customers, especially the larger enterprises, will continue to look for vendors who offer a heterogeneous approach and do not tie them into proprietary technology costs.
We have always worked closely with industry partners to create open solutions. For example, in our virtual integrated system (VIS), Dell can work with all major server vendors.
Similarly, on storage or networking needs, we can offer solutions that work with our customer's legacy installed base.
The key focus for companies is to plan their IT investments to facilitate future growth and to ensure strategic growth is not impacted by any cost-reduction initiatives.
Which are the new product offerings lined up for 2011 that, you think, will get the market all excited?
While we continue to introduce new products under our desktops and notebooks category, we believe mobility is going to drive the future trends.
Given the rapid growth in India's mobile market, we feel there is a tremendous opportunity to grow in the smartphones category.
We launched the Dell Streak towards the end of 2010. Streak is a compact and powerful companion for people who want to expand the ability to access their digital lives ‘on the go'.
Its built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and available 3G connectivity facilitate easy access for downloading and listening to music, updating social networking status in real-time, and staying connected to friends and family through e-mail, text, IM, and voice calls. We will continue to add to our offerings.