Technology is shrinking, solutions are increasing

Products and technology have become very simple , and easily available. Earlier it was not so easily available, so it was difficult to start business around that, you needed to be dependent on the principle vendor. But that not the case anymore. In fact companies which were predominantly on proprietary technology have now an uncertain future. It is become increasingly evident by how the financial markets are treating them and how they are themselves trying to de- structure. These things take a couple of years, but the effects are already visible. For partners, life becomes easy because the ivory towers open up for them to work around, says Neeraj Matliyani, Director, Storage, DELL India

What trends do you see for storage technologies

In the past few years we are seeing increasing amount of what analysts, consumers or even vendors call consumerization of enterprise technology. Earlier a lot of proprietary architecture, to hold architecture was used but now we are seeing an increasing amount of X 86 technologies. Over the past 2 years, the trends around storage are about flash technology which is fast becoming mainstream now. We see more than less of our orders about storage quotations going to customers with flash technology rather than spinning disk alone. So that’s one great change that has happened in the storage arena. Because of that we have seen new vendors emerging and even those who were not in a dominant position are taking advantage of this change in technology to move up in the customer value chain. Because when there is a shift in the technology , that is the opportunity to break what has been done in the past and take up something that’s totally new. Dell sees a lot of advantage in this because we are all about open architecture. So with this new flash technology coming in, our technology which is around storage centre, is increasingly finding adoption with our customers. That is why today we are just one and a half or two percentage points behind the number two vendor in the Indian market. That’s one change we are seeing in technology. The second change that we are seeing which yet has to be seen as far as adoption is concerned is with fast flash and lot of powerful buses in systems, it is possible to build storage apps without using cache. Earlier storage was required because there were mechanical drives which needed to be concentrated using electronic flash. But now you can put in flash drives in a server and use software to build storage. If you place the storage close to the server, they need not be separate. Why can we not have it all together and scale it up by adding more and more such appliances. This is how Facebook or Amazon work their data centres and nobody can deny that they have much higher loads, higher availability and much more data and processing power than even the largest enterprise in the world. So this technology is now available for commercial use and for this we have tied up with Nutanix. Together we have come up with a product called “Dell XC – extreme convergence” series, which is our server storage combined appliance. It is very good for users of VDI, virtualization, Big Data and also in other applications where high performance and scalability of storage is required at the same time. Customers interested in it because it cuts off the complexity of having a separate server and storage and putting it all together. In ourtraditional products like storage centre, we have a new model called SC 4020 around a quarter ago. We also keep refreshing our ecologic line, the PS series 9, so we have a PS 4210 which is again a flash and disk combined product. These are traditional technology products.

When we talk of server and storage it is largely physical. So how has the cloud impacted the storage market?

In the storage market in India, according to IDC’s data, the market seems to be shrinking. It has a little bit to do with cloud adoption, but I think it’s more about generic economic scenario. Less storage is being bought generally. Another reason is developments in technology. Provisioning where you need less capacity than what you did in the past, is the need of the hour. However, as far as Dell’s performance is concerned, we have been gaining market share. In fact we have gained one position every quarter in the last 3 quarters, and our numbers are growing in high double digits as compared to the market decline of double digits. So we do not see the impact in terms of cloud reducing our business, because our business is actually growing. But we take it to the next step. There is no doubt that cloud affords a lot of advantage to customers in terms of making things easier to use and run. But it also brings question marks in the minds of people, customers, about security, about the total cost of infrastructure. Frankly, its hiring space and computing power, so at one point hiring becomes more expensive than owning their own infrastructure. The customers have these issues in mind. But the Dell XC series, what we are providing for customers to run their data centre infrastructures exactly like maybe a Google, so you can have your own cloud. It can be hosted on your own property or on a data centre, the combination of both works in terms of easy to use infrastructure. This, customers can own, so for a long period of time, the investment will be less than the cloud. That is something that we are getting to our customers.

What about data security for storage? Especially the XC series, what kind of security provisioning does it have?

Data absolutely has to be secure, we increasingly see a lot of news items about a lot of users or customers suffering because data has been lost. Most of them ultimately turn out to be malicious activity or by not having enough security in place when you use data. The devices themselves whether they are responsible for data being exposed, at least there are not too many instances. In the Dell XC series, whether it is encryption or any form of protection that is required for security of data, it is absolutely there and it is really world class.

Any specific technologies you are using for securing data?

The normal encryption techniques, standard worldwide encryption technology in terms of the normal technology that can keep data safe, are applied there.

What is your channel strategy for the new product that you have launched?

As I said, we have traditional storage products that are focused on customers in bigger markets and as well as enterprise. For that our strategy is broader based in terms of partners who are centric around software and hardware skills – so it’s a very broad based strategy. Typically, we have a fairly large marketing base and we have been doing this over the last few quarters, since we implemented our new Go To Market. Today we have a lot to offer to our customers from the product standpoint. Increasingly customers appreciate not only the kind of productivity, technology and the service Dell provides but also in terms of the strategy that Dell has adopted, and it’s doing so well after privatisation, especially in terms of our competitors in the market. This brand and this product base is what we provide to our partners. For the XC series, we will be slightly more selective there because it is an enterprise product. It will make sense because customers have large EDI and large virtualisation projects running. If we are really going to go after the early adopters as far as the market is concerned, so we will be working with partners who will want to target large customers and whose bread and butter is specially around the system integration specially around desktop virtualisation and overall server virtualisation.

What trends can you foresee for storage products?

I think the simplification of technology will continue. It means that it becomes more intelligent and you don’t need human beings to do a lot of things they used to do earlier, the machine does this to you. Then technology will be more widely adopted. I think the concept of separate storage, separate server and separate network will diminish over time. The trend is that devices are becoming simpler and easier to use. Rather than depending on people to run them, we will depend on tools and analytics, which will take human beings out of the data centre to do things that are more productive. That is as far as technology is concerned. But what is the impact on people? Especially on our partner community? Increasingly the trend of consumerisation of IT will continue. Technology has made it so simple that the camera you are using today was ten years ago, was a professional device, where you needed 15 – 20 years of experience on how to use that device. Today you focus on the content rather than how to get it. The same thing is going to happen to enterprise infrastructure. The good thing is, it is driven by software, not by hardware which is proprietary. Software is easy because a whole community, users or partners, can contribute and create revenue streams out of them. For example, 10-12 years ago, in the mobile phone business you made money to sell it or service it. But today there is a huge revenue stream around application, around integrating devices around corporate use, even creating applications for corporate use. I expect the same thing to happen in the enterprise space which will democratise technology, take it away from the large companies only and make it available as a platform for the use of a lot of our partners.