GEC NEWS WIRESince the news of HP split, market has been witness to several interesting remarks from those in competition, Dell being one of them. Cleverly playing with his words, Basil Ayass, Marketing Director, Dell Middle East talked to Enterprise Channels MEA team about the MEA opportunity and Dell strategy and how Dell sees opportunity even in chaos.
“Our competitors try different strategies, however, Dell, from day one has been about open, capable and affordable solutions. We offer choice; we don’t force any customer along any certain stack or proprietary technologies. Dell believes in open standards and we will prevail in competition.”
BASIL AYASS, MARKETING DIRECTOR, DELL MIDDLE EAST
How is the market growing and how is Dell growing in this?
We at Dell understand the importance of the Middle East; it’s growing and is part of an emerging market. We are seeing double-digit growth across our enterprise portfolio end-to-end.
There has been some chaos in the market related to your competitors; so is Dell planning to take advantage of the troubled waters?
You call it chaos, I call it opportunity. With change, there is opportunity. Some customers, some countries are going through political instabilities whereas other companies, our competitors are going through mergers and acquisitions and splits. Dell is steadfast in its strategy. We are not moving away from the focus; we are here to offer customers end-to-end solutions, to simplify their lives and give them the power to do more. We see opportunity as things are juggled and changed around, and will help customers to overcome the change and find better solutions.
One of your competitors has been trying to recapture the market with its own proprietary software; is that a threat to you?
Our competitors try different strategies, however, Dell, from day one has been about open, capable and affordable solutions. We don’t believe in proprietary; all the hardware that we sell, all the software we work with is always multi-vendor, open standards. We believe in open technology. If a customer wants to use Dell for all his IT needs, we are more than happy to have him. But if a customer wants the best of breed approach and wants to work with Dell on a very specific solution and wants that solution to be compatible with what he has installed, trained and invested in already, even if that’s a competitor product, we’re happy to do that as well. We offer choice; we don’t force any customer along any certain stack or proprietary technologies. We don’t believe in locking. Locking has been successful for few vendors over a short period of time but in the long run, it always fails. Think about Super DVD and Blue Ray; Blue Ray prevailed. Think about iOS and Android, Android has prevailed. Dell believes in open standards and we will prevail in competition.
Dell has invested a lot in this market and got returns as well; how has the business been so far and what are the next strategies in place?
At Dell, we always look for Return on Investment when we are doing an investment. In the Middle East, we have expanded our offices, built solution centres. From the marketing perspective, we participated in GITEX since three years. We launched new solutions. Our investments and acquisitions have yielded a lot of results and now we have an end-to-end software portfolio and we are tracking the returns there. We are seeing very fast growth in our software portfolio in the ME. As we continue to invest in that, hire new people, and focus on software, to take Dell to the new era of IT- the Software Defined Data centre.
What are your new plans?
Recently we announced that our software arm has a new office in Dubai, the Dell Software. They will have their own hiring and finance team, and can grow at a much faster trajectory than the traditional Dell. Dell is happily growing; but at the end of the day, market dynamics do come into play. With PCs, servers and storage, being such a matured offering, you can’t really grow them like 100% or 200%. That’s why we spawned off Dell Software, so that they can grow even faster. That will be our focus next year ensuring that Dell Software is an extremely successful company in enterprise sector.
Could you share any success stories where you clearly scored over your competitors?
The number of success stories is way too many. But few which have gone public include the recent MoU with Sharjah Police- they didn’t use Dell last year or previously but are now moving to a Dell end-to-end solution in their data centre and in their safe city initiative. In another instance, Dubai Culture used to deal with three different vendors for networking, storage and servers; in the last few months, we acquired them, transformed their data centres and now they are using Dell for server, storage, networking and also for security.
