‘Solutions leadership made Dell No. 1 in server market’

For the first time, Dell India garnered the highest revenue share in the server market in Q3 of 2014 (July-September), with 38 per cent, beating HP, at 31 per cent. According to IDC, Dell’s server shipments grew sequentially by 17 per cent in terms of units in Q3 with 29 per cent market share, second to HP’s market leading 33 per cent. Manish Gupta, Director, Enterprise Solutions Group, Dell India, told BusinessLine , “Solutions leadership helped Dell gain number 1 market share in servers.” Excerpts:

What do you attribute the growth in market share to?

Our new go-to-market strategy, initiated in February with clear geographic accountability for all regions, has contributed to this growth. As a result, we have widened our reach. We have deepened engagements with existing customers asking for richer IT configurations for critical, higher end workloads.

Second, we are not selling just servers but end-to-end solutions to customers such as data centre build/migration services as well as storage and networking solutions.

Third, our innovative 13th generation PowerEdge server portfolio launched last quarter and the recently launched FX2 servers, which are a modular offering to fit any customer workloadwith its converged infrastructure including compute, storage and networking, are also contributing.

Some of them are BFSI, IT & ITeS, government, Retail (including e-commerce firms) and mid-market customers. The government vertical, which was slow over the last few quarters, was a large opportunity for us in Q3 and will continue to show traction over the next couple of quarters.

We got a much larger spread of customers in BFSI with some significant customer wins in Q3. Our end-to-end scalable solutions strategy is resonating well with customers who are looking to build private cloud environments and virtualise their infrastructure to take on critical workloads. As a result, our average sales value has zoomed up and is now 25 per higher than industry numbers.

We are continuing to ramp up our sales team to add more technically skilled people who can go after high value, high margin deals that are sustainable and strategic, to add value.

We are also ramping up our services support team for sales and investing in research and development.