Dell Technologies is bullish on mid-range market with PowerStore

Tian Beng Ng
Senior VP & General Manager - Channels, APJ, Dell Technologies

In the APJ market, Dell Technologies has prioritised four key things. First, PowerStore, the platform which addresses a lot of Cloud challenges and it is targeted towards the mid-range market. Another priority of the company is remote and the hybrid workforce. It will be a huge opportunity for partners and they will play a crucial role to support the customers. Third, Power for Partners. Power is a campaign on which Dell is working with its partners. The company has a set of programs that allow Partners to go out and acquire and to cross-sell to their respective customers. So it is an exciting program where Dell is working for partners, called Power. Finally, the last priority in Project APEX, it is a new as-a-service initiative and the company is quite excited about it.

In a chat with VARINDIA, Tian Beng Ng, Senior Vice President & General Manager - Channels, APJ, Dell Technologies discussed at length about the financial year, trends, channel vision, Project APEX and much more.

2020: A strong growth year

"2020 has been a very good year for the tech industry. I am happy to say that we had very strong FY-21 results at Dell. The year’s revenue was actually $94.2 billion, which is up by 2% YoY. The Q4 revenue was $26.1 billion, up by 9% YoY. We really had record performance in many areas. Operating income was a new record effort by $1 billion. Cash flow was very strong at $11.4 billion for the full year. We delivered $52 billion through our partners globally in orders. So, you can imagine just by the business by itself, $52 billion is very significant," mentions Tian Beng.

Key Trends & Channel Vision

Talking about the trends and channel vission he says, "Especially in Channel, we continue to specialise around specific industries. The pandemic actually has brought a lot of challenges and opportunities. We have seen the growth of data and it is continuous. In fact by 2025 we estimate there will be about 163 Zettabytes of data. We at Dell have identified six key technologies that will be key to the future and they are Cloud, Edge, AI, Machine Learning, 5G, Data Management and Security. So these six technologies are really important for digital transformation.

If you look at the partner landscape and the trends, I think the first big one we are observing is multi-cloud. In fact we estimate that by 2023, 70% of all enterprises will actually be deploying multi-cloud strategies. Multi-cloud means that it will be both on-premise and across different public clouds. With multi-cloud, obviously the complexity will increase. With this the channel partners will have a huge opportunity to play here to support customers as they adopt a multi-cloud strategy. So that will be the first key trend.

Secondly, Edge computing is very important, because now it is important to bring computing closer to edge to process the data faster. Now, there is not enough time to wait to move the data all the way from the edge back to the data centre. Then with 5G the bandwidth will increase, so you will see a lot of trends will move to edge. We believe that nearly 80-100% of edge computing will happen through our channel partners, because to do edge computing you really need very specific types of solutions. I think our partners are in the best position to actually do that. Over the next 3-4 years we believe that edge computing has the potential to have a market growth of $120 billion.

Third is as-a-service and the consumption model. It is really a big trend in the happening, and one of the big reasons is the big increase in demand for business specific outcomes. I think because the partners are able to understand their customers’ business better, are able to actually do that. As-a service or consumption model is not new to Dell. In fact, we have over 2,000 customers already who are currently on the as-a-service or the consumption model. In India, we have recently launched our Flex on Demand. So we do have a consumption offering in the Indian market and we work through our partners. The other big interesting thing is project APEX. We announced it last year. Project APEX is our focus and that will be driving a lot of our offerings to as-a-service.

Last is workforce transformation. During the pandemic last year, I think everyone got to know that PC is the first choice of people now. The PC demand is just really surging and I think we are seeing that trend to continue. In fact, many folks are calling it the Renaissance of the PC.

These are our channel vision of the future. At Dell we are focused on it with our channel partners along with our three tenets of our channel vision. No. 1 is Trust - we will ensure that we are building trust with our partners. In fact, when we designed our new partner program, a lot of it was based on consultation with our partners, getting feedback from them. So, the program was on trust and we definitely want to continue to deepen that trust. Next is Growth. When we think about growth, we want to think about acquisition, acquiring new customers, cross-selling, data centre opportunities. We do have a lot of programs in place to encourage our partners. Finally, the next one is Change - it is something that is a way more longer term. But we want to ensure that we want to work with our partners to really work on things that are more transformational. For example Digital transformation, project APEX, these are some examples of change."

PowerStore

Elaborating on PowerStore Tian Beng says, "We are excited about PowerStore because the mid-range market is really the largest opportunity. In fact, in APJ, mid-range market accounts for 62% of the storage market and it is about $2.2 billion, just this year. PowerStore, the platform, addresses a lot of the cloud challenges and we are really excited because it is a revolutionary architecture. It really combines the best of the hardware with Apps-on capability. So, with this platform you can actually run your apps directly on your clients, which is really unique. There are three big advantages of PowerStore, one is data centric. So it can really pick on any workload. It is up to seven times faster; in fact it is three times more responsive than our previous mid-range solution. Secondly, it is actually more intelligent and one can program it and easily integrate with the VMware kubernetes. It is very flexible because of the Apps-on feature. So with PowerStore, customers can really deploy it to meet their cloud strategy and their business needs very well. We believe that the Dell PowerStore solution will really revolutionise the cloud era and elevate cloud strategies for companies."