At a time when India’s Independent Software Vendor ecosystem is vying for global market exposure, Dell is creating opportunities for them by opening its global supply chain and help Indian ISVs export solutions on global turf.
Erwin Meyer, Regional Sales Director, OEM Solutions Group, Dell speaks with Zia Askari from ChannelDrive.in about the way Dell is targeting ISV ecosystem and what is the company’s strategy to grow its business prospects.
How do you look at the ISVs in India?
Specifically, what we see happening in India is that there are a lot of ISV’s and companies that have a lot of intellectual property, and they are selling their software to telecommunication companies.
They are coming to us and saying that they’d like to build appliances and make sure that they are bundling their IP with Dell solutions- could be servers or storage– and they refer to us to guide them in doing this outside of India.
That is where the Dell organization comes. We are using the Dell global supply chain to help a lot of the Indian ISVs to export their solutions out of India, to the Middle East, to the US, and to Europe and using Dell global services to help them support this.
They are recreating to help develop the software, in supporting the software but they want to make sure they have the right performance in any of the markets globally. So what we can do, we can turn an India based ISV using the Dell supply chain/ the Dell services into a global company and that is really an area to focus on.
Is there a focus programme that you have targeting the ISV’s?
From a Dell OEM perspective, we are focusing on three main areas- telecommunications, healthcare and industrial organization. And in all those three areas, we are focusing and we have been building our sales force alongside that strategy, so I need people that really speak the language of the industry.
Any ISV you can name from India who is working on this?
Not currently, but we are a global company so we have many ISVs from across all markets working with us.
What are the key priorities that you have today when it comes to generating business and increasing profitability for Dell?
Dell has been in the telecom industry for quite some time. The Dell OEM solutions team is building relationships with customers that have their own intellectual property (IP) and we are bundling that IP with the Dell capabilities –be it Dell hardware, servers, or even our software solutions.
On the OEM side, what we then do is to work with customersand rebrand Dell solutions when we are bundling it with customer IP. We may focus on specific requirements that our customers have.What we are seeing, for instance, is that many of our customers are looking for long life cycle solutions.
Certifications, especially in the telecom industry, are really expensive, so our customers really benefit from having platforms that are available much longer than the standard platforms. Those are the areas that we are focusing on today.
Some of our customers want to enhance their brand image in the market – they want to put their own branding on our solutions and we work with them to make that happen, so that goes up to the level where we are rebranding our manuals and rebranding our boxes, helping our customers to succeed in the market.
If you are looking at our customer base in the NFV space, they could be the likes of software vendors, ISVs or system integrators (SIs). Basically, we work with any customer across multiple industries, and specific to this event, we are targeting customers from the telecom industry. Customers often look at Dell as their infrastructure partner. And that’s the market that we are aiming for here in CommunicAsia.
Overall, the next generation “enablement” space is getting really hot, with almost all the traditional networking vendors are jumping on to this whether it is Cisco, Avaya, Huawei, Ericsson – these are traditionally very strong players on the operator side. In this scenario, what are some of the USPs and offerings that Dell would bring for the telecoms customers?
What you see in many cases is that we have experience in virtualizing data centers for enterprises. We can bring our experience in that area to the telecommunication data centers and that is where a lot of the NEP’s and CSP’s value the experience that we are bringing in. Also, if you are looking at this from the SDN perspective, we have a pretty unique offering.
The idea is to make sure that we have a platform of choice that can host networks such as Cisco or Huawei. So vendors/operators are looking for a platform that can host both these solutions with no complications. You need to have a common platform and that is what Dell is trying to deliver to market.
We are trying to not compete against these vendors but we are trying to move them up the chain to be able to do what they have been doing best, providing the NFV platforms to customers. On the SDN side, we have a completely disaggregated approach – we deliver white-boxes and we work with partners like Big Switch or Cumulus to provide their operating systems.
