Server business unaffected from macroeconomic worries: Dell India VP

Dell Technologies India's Manish Gupta talks about how the distributed computing demand is giving rise to the adoption of edge servers in India and how the company is eyeing this opportunity

Dell Technologies leads India’s mainstream server market with a 48.6 per cent revenue share, as per IDC. Manish Gupta, Vice President and General Manager of Infrastructure Solutions, Dell Technologies India in an interview with Sourabh Lele says that distributed computing demand is giving rise to the adoption of edge servers in India which is an emerging computing paradigm that refers to a range of networks and devices at or near the user. He also talks about how Dell is eyeing this opportunity. Edited excerpts below:
 
What shifts do you see in the workloads of Indian customers with the growth of edge computing and 5G?


We already have deployments of edge in India with large customers and there is a lot of interest coming from healthcare, retail, and manufacturing. We believe that the opportunity in the next couple of years on edge is going to be huge. The reason for that is very simple. The amount of data that is available on the edge cannot be backhauled into the data centre. So it needs to start getting consumed and analysed right at the edge.
 
How many edge computing projects in India is Dell already working on?
I would not be able to give you a number, but it is happening across a lot of customers. There is a lot of computing that is now happening on the edge. We have launched a line of servers that are meant only for edge. They can run in conditions as low as negative 20 degrees Celsius, and as high as 65 degrees Celsius. So you don't need a data center, as the servers can withstand a lot of harsh environments.
 
Dell has recently launched 13 new variants of its PowerEdge servers in India. What do these servers bring to the table?
The new portfolio of servers brings a lot more cores to the CPU. There is a lot of computing power that is coming from the server and along with that, the pipe to utilize that computing power. As a result, businesses will now be able to utilize servers to do a lot more as compared to what they were doing earlier. So as all businesses are getting digitized, they need to have servers to compute the data and run the applications that they are running to get the outcome for their customers. So they will be able to do a lot more with a new generation of servers.
 
These servers will most certainly reduce the carbon footprint because now you're able to do more with less power. Firstly, the space utilization by itself in the data center will be reduced. Second, you can reduce the power consumption.
 
The economic slowdown and inflation have dragged down the global PC shipments by 30 per cent in 2023. What is the impact of these factors on the server market?

Digitization is not a journey that you can start and stop. It's a constant evolution. We need to remember that organisations need a lot of computing power. We are very bullish about the growth in the market in India. In the last year, for example, the mainstream server market in India grew at a phenomenal pace.
 
As per the IDC Q4 report, the Indian market for the full year 2022 grew at 36.2 per cent for mainstream servers. So that is also a reflection of the fact of how customers are continuing to digitize. We have not seen any temporary dips in the demand. It is continuing to be strong.
 
How is the nature of demand changing with the addition of new technologies in the market? 

At this time, we are seeing a lot of interest and getting a lot of excitement from the customers in deploying new workloads. Artificial Intelligence and edge computing are creating workloads which were not being deployed at scale earlier. As that now happens at scale, infrastructure products become critical for customers to be able to run their projects on artificial intelligence, get insights and so on. There is a lot of growth that we expect from IT ITeS, web tech, telecom, public sector, banking and financial sector and manufacturing.