Infra services is a big area of investment for us: Suresh Vaswani

Interview with President, Dell Services

Personal computer maker Dell which also has a significant presence in IT services segment on Thursday appointed former Wipro veteran Anand Sankaran as its president and global head of Dell Services Infrastructure and Cloud Computing lines of business. Dell is expanding its IT services capabilities with SURESH VASWANI, again a former Wipro veteran at the helm as the president of Dell Services. In an interview to Bibhu Ranjan Mishra, Vaswani talks about the rationale behind the appointment and the company’s plan to grow the services business. Edited excerpts …

 

What does Sankaran’s appointment mean for Dell? 

 

The infrastructure and cloud computing business are very important parts of our services business and quite strategic to Dell. It's an area where we will invest quite significantly. It's an area where we want to really make a huge impact on our customers in terms of modernising their infrastructure and taking them to next generation solutions. Anand has been a veteran leader in the IT infrastructure space, and clearly with his joining, he gets us fantastic business experience and execution capabilities that will help to build on the foundation we have already laid. 

 

What would be the size of portfolio that he would be responsible for? 

 

Dell Services, as you know, is roughly about $8.5 billion, and infrastructure management services is a very significant part of that business. While Dell Services employs close to 50,000 odd people, a fifth of that work for infrastructure and cloud computing business. However, the number of people does not represent the size and strength of the business because we use a lot of tools and technology. 

 

How do you want to grow those businesses?

 

Dell is an infrastructure company as it also deals with computers, servers, storage and networking among others. We have deep root in that space, and it is an area where we want to grow to stay significantly ahead of the market. 

 

Infrastructure service is considered as a low margin business; there are IT firms in India who are overly dependent on this segment, but have not been so profitable? What is your view?

 

I don’t think there is any difference in terms of margin structure as compared to applications business. It’s a very core area for customers; it is their backbone. Infrastructure business is relatively a larger proportion of our total services business as compared to anybody else. It’s an area where we would like to invest in so that the customers can build their future applications on top of that. 

 

The recent quarter performance of many Indian IT services companies show that growth may have returned to the industry. What is your reading of the demand environment?

 

The overall IT services market globally is more than $800 billion. We are addressing the market differently by not only doing what we need to do today for the customers, but providing consulting services on new generation areas and helping them migrate there. There is definitely a shift happening in the minds of the customers. We are basically building our differential capabilities around the ability to make customers to go to the future, rather than just managing their past in a low-cost delivery model. 

 

What is the future of India as an offshore IT destination?

 

India will continue to be an attractive destination not only in terms of global delivery but from the point of view that there are great talents available in the country. We have close to 30,000 people in India, and a significant part of that works for Dell Services. We do intend to leverage and grow that base in India. 

 

With Dell now going private, does it impact your ability to aggressively expand into newer areas?

 

I think Dell going private does a few things. First of all, we have only one area of focus which is the customer. Instead of driving the business from a quarterly perspective, we can look at everything from medium to long-term view. Going private also allows us to make investments in areas where we want to build the future of our company.