In an interview with ETtech, Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, President, Server Solutions Division, Dell EMC talks about their vendor lock in issues,DSSD’s future,India’s RnD role and the impact of X86 segments on their business.Edited Excerpts
How are you planning to take care of issues like vendor lock-in for your present customers across Dell and EMC?
We are not into locking customers rather we are offering them a better choice.
For context, we closed the deal in September. We have been trying to merge everything together, and this will still take some more time.
This is of course is the largest tech acquisition and merger ever made. All the assets of storage and other things in EMC combined with the Dell assets around storage, networking and converged infrastructure and so on.
So, the choice is built out of different ecosystems, open source development, competition - which is great as it pushes innovation in our partners and but also complexity for a customer. There’s also complexity for me as I have to offer two solutions so that you have a choice.
Is it true that Dell Technologies has continued to use Cisco UCS servers and not Dell Servers?
So, Vblock is defined as a converged infrastructure offering with Cisco compute and networking and EMC storage. It will continue to be. That’s what it was defined as and we are not changing the definition of that.
There’s something called VxRack which is a more modern interpretation of scale-out version of this and that’s where you’ll see Dell on Dell technology. And, there’s VxRail which is on Dell technology running through hyper-converged.
I think, as part of the nature of the ecosystem is, customers sometimes ask us ‘I love your X but I also want Y from someone else. And, I am the customer. So you need to help me put these things together.’
What happens to partners who aren’t aligned to Dell EMC?
We are bringing the two channel programs, both of which are very good together and reaching out to the entire channel community on a few changes. We changed the program to keep it world class and competitive. We are going into a new year and I know that Channel group is having that discussion with companies.
There are new tiers, there’s how we approach rebates and partnerships, training and so on. What I’ve heard back from channel partners is they want to know if I only am part of one? What happens to me?
And, that’s ok. We already had partnerships where we had one portion of our business. We never forced them out and said ‘If you are only going to take network then you also have to server.’
Does DSSD does have a future under Dell EMC?
DSSD has amazing performance in terms of flash capability and there some of the software might have been written better, connectors to things like Hadoop and other workloads are world-class. I think you’ll see that.
We don’t think nowadays like individual projects but the IP that is to be distributed across entire set of products. So, we are open to all of that discussion right now.
That’s a longer term discussion as well because Converged Infrastructure was a great example of moving towards hyper converged which is really about bringing differentiated IP together, building a stack that a customer thinks – all of this works, it’s simple, high performance.
How big a role has the x86 divisions played in terms of revenues in the last one year?
Well, we don’t break out revenue. If you look at Dell before the acquisition and if you look at enterprise group, the last time we reported, earnings were broken out. It was majority of the enterprise group was x86 server.
It was more than 50%. It really wouldn’t have changed the time we went private. With the acquisition now, we are bringing all the ISG together. It’s still a very healthy chunk of revenue. It’s growing.
It continues to grow. We are growing faster than the market. In Q2 for instance, we were No.1 on server units – x86 globally as per reports from Gartner.
Briefly tell me, what new you have done in the last two years in R&D, from a server innovation perspective. Explain.
For Dell Technologies India is the 2nd biggest footprint in the world after US.
Every part of the company is represented in India. There is no other country outside US where every part of the company has some sort of a capability. So, it’s become the central hub that’s so important to the company.
Just on Dell legacy for a second, this R&D centre was where we really differentiated the products that we do – servers. And, I believe that we are at least a generation ahead in systems management and automation tools and infrastructure management tools in the compute space.
Probably about 5 years ago, we took the lead and now people are following you, all of it is coming out of here so. What we are not looking for in our R&D centre in India is something to follow or sustain. This is about origination and development, invention.
This is the central location for development and invention that goes across the entire compute layer. And so, if people have technology backgrounds and they are architects, experts in technology tell them to call to me. We want to put them onboard because last few years, we have been growing at a pretty stead cliff here.
What are they key verticals that has driven Dell EMC’s India business?
It’s really across all the verticals. So, banking and Cloud service providers have kept the momentum going forward. Telco is a very big business for us. HPC is very big business and I actually think, what’s happening in India around the different initiatives with the government and the industry coming together, it’s very exciting.
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