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After having worked at Indian information technology services major Wipro for more than two decades Anand Sankaran moved last year October to Dell as its president and global head of infrastructure and cloud computing services. In his first interaction with the media since joining Dell, Sankaran says the last eight months have been “exciting, challenging, rewarding and a lot of hard work”. He talks to Itika Sharma Punit on the acceptance of cloud computing by clients and Dell’s areas of focus. Edited excerpts:
After 25 years at Wipro, how have the last eight months at Dell been?
I came in at a time when Dell was in the middle of finalising its plans for the next year and also putting down its five-year plan. It was in the midst of deciding on a strong differentiator for Dell Services, and infrastructure services in particular. The last eight months have been exciting, challenging, rewarding and a lot of hard work. I am looking forward to the next few years because we will be able to make inroads into certain areas we are focusing on.
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The value Indian service providers bring to customers is the ability to manage scale using offshoring. While we can do that, we also use a lot of our intellectual properties while providing services to customers. Our wedge is our intellectual property, both software and hardware, and design solutions that can help customers move to transformed platforms.
What does Dell’s infrastructure business focus on?
Healthcare is a large focus area for us. Banking, financial services and insurance is a key segment. Besides, we have business in manufacturing, hospitality, retail and travel. We pick a combination of countries and verticals to focus on. For example, in West Asia, healthcare and oil and gas are focus areas for us. But travel, hospitality, or even banking may not primary focus areas there in the near future. Similarly, in Japan and Singapore, we will focus on financial services. In the US and Europe, we will focus across industries, but in Latin America the focus will be specifically on banking and manufacturing.
How do you view India as a market?
India is strategic as we have a large team here and it continues to be a source of talent. In business, India is one of the fastest growing markets for our hardware, software and services businesses. However, for infrastructure services, we will not spread ourselves too thin in India. We will probably pick some verticals and a particular set of accounts. We will not go after large government deals in India, mainly because certain projects in the past have not been handled the way they should have been. We may also look at certain large accounts in manufacturing and telecom.
How much has the adoption of cloud matured now versus earlier years?
Today, the discussions that are happening in the market are about customers wanting to exploit new technologies such as Cloud, and looking at the current scenario. I believe that those companies that don’t move into these new technologies would probably lose out the competitive advantage that they currently have in the market. About 24 months ago, the discussions were more about putting non-core functions on the cloud. But today, the discussions have moved to even core applications being put on a virtualised infrastructure and orchestrated on a private cloud.
