Today enterprises are facing the challenges with regards to storage capacities. Storing the immense data which is being generated every second has become a difficult thing to do. Organizations are struggling against managing data at the lowest possible cost and keeping it secure. Finding effective storage solutions as per their requirement is the biggest nuisance for enterprises nowadays. Being an undisputed leader, Dell Technologies has been catering big enterprises with its effective and reliable storage solution. To understand how storage complexities hampering enterprises and solutions they offer to help them, DT interacted with Amit Mehta, Director - Modern Data Center Business at Dell Technologies.
DT: What are the major concerns for the organizations when it comes to having an effective storage solution?
Amit Mehta: When it comes to having an effective storage solution, one of the most prominent issues organizations are currently dealing with is an increase in data causing a deluge of data. According to the Global Data Protection Index, a study by Dell EMC in partnership with Vanson Bourne, India has witnessed an increase in the amount of data managed from 2.79 petabytes (PB) in 2016 to 6.43PB in 2018 in India. This is being primarily generated from customer interactions and system records which have to be processed, hence, creating a challenge for the organization on its storage and analysis at the lowest possible cost. It is very important that an organizations’ IT budget commemorates with the growth of data.
The second is related to how much money has been spent on the storing and protection of that data as compared to the amount of money spent on innovating the emerging technologies which mine the data, to drive digital experiences.The third is other technical things related to how we manage the performance characteristics of a workload or application.
For some organizations, the challenges are not regarding performance but around storing petabytes of data and for some the biggest area of concern is related to automation, orchestration, and security. To sum up, managing data at low cost, balancing between innovations, performance characteristics of the data, latency and workload definition, automation, and finally the security of the data are some areas which the customers are looking at while choosing an effective storage solution.
DT: What are the major trends in Indian cloud solution market in the context of enterprises?
Amit Mehta: As organizations are becoming digital, there is a lot of data that is being generated from customer interactions and system records which have to be stored and processed.
Trends in the Indian Cloud Solutions market in the context of enterprises:
Today, if you look at aggregating this data from multiple sources, analyzing it, the emergence of big data analytics becomes very clear. In the manufacturing space for instance, customers are now looking at adopting IoT and Machine Learning in a unique way.
DT: Which of the latest solutions you are offering to the enterprises for their big storage needs?
Amit Mehta: From a Dell Technologies standpoint, we have been focusing on customers who are looking at building their own infrastructure. Customers use what we call a build/construct mode to customize their own storage infrastructure in the way they want.In storage terms, we are currently talking on a few key modern data center pillars. We are talking about all-flash storage systems, which is where we have been leading the market for a while in all flash range with XtremIO, Unity and VMAX All-Flash Arrays. The big launch that we did last year that was PowerMax which was the high end of the enterprise market and was our first end to end industry leading NVMe which delivers unmatched performance and great latency characteristics. It actually gets to a microsecond latency characteristic and that today delivers 3:1 and 5:1 kind of data reduction.
All our innovations, especially those with cloud-enabled capabilities are now impearled with AI capabilities so that they can automatically solve problems before they raise an alert. We have recently launched VxFlex platform for our multi-hypervisor environment. VxFlex can cater to environments which are multi-hypervisor and provides benefits like extreme performance and workload consolidation.
Recently, at Dell Technologies World 2019, we unveiled new storage solutions to help our customers become more adaptive and secure their data. One of the solutions we launched was Dell EMC Unity XT, which is up to 2X faster than its predecessor and 67% faster than its closest competitor. We also launched the Dell Technologies Cloud, a new set of cloud infrastructure solutions to make hybrid cloud environments simpler to deploy and manage.
DT: What is the distribution model of Dell Technologies in the Indian market?
Amit Mehta: We believe that distributors form an integral part of our distribution model and have also set up a channel partner program to provide them with the proper training needed to excel. Our program categorizes our partners into Gold, Platinum, Titanium and Titanium Black based on the level of revenue, training and service targets they achieve. This new structure enables them to expand their product offerings and gain a higher share in the market. This is a testimony of the level of commitment they have for us.
The different categories of our partners:
DT: How has been the performance of Dell Technologies so far in terms of market growth? What is your future roadmap?
Amit Mehta: The storage market witnessed a robust growth of 16% last year which was backed by many government initiatives. In terms of performance, Dell Technologies has maintained its undisputed leadership in India’s enterprise storage systems market with 24.7% by vendor revenue, i.e. nearly 1.5x the nearest competitor. We have continued our leadership for the fourth consecutive quarter in CY2018, as per IDC.
We are now moving ahead in the direction of positioning ourselves as partners in the cloud journey of our customers. We believe that hybrid cloud and multi-cloud are the ways for delivering IT transformation and customers who embrace IT transformation, can therefore succeed at digital transformation. Organizations who undertake IT transformation can be faster, 5x times more competitive. Therefore, our focus for the next couple of years will be on shifting the perception from buying storage based on technology to buying better business outcomes and progressing in their IT transformation and digital transformation journey. To achieve this, we have to have a strong channel ecosystem which needs to scale out. There is also a great opportunity for partners here to be in the centre of IT transformation and partner with both public providers and on-prem providers like us.
