Anil Sethi, VP, Channels, Dell EMC India, shares the company’s channel strategies for 2019
Key highlights 2018 and opportunities for 2019
IT spending in India saw a 9 per cent growth accounting to US$ 87.1 billion in revenue in 2018. Enterprise software and IT services companies led the growth. The year saw emergence of new businesses which leveraged digital mediums by creating new revenue models. I also observed that businesses moved to a more evolved thinking framework where technology was used as a tool to create elaborate and compelling user experiences.
The coming year brings in multiple trends for the channel industry to bet on. To start with, few of the top technologies that will shape the IT infrastructure are around multi-cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructure. Companies are now focusing on migrating their data and work to the combination of clouds which gives them a holistic experience. Another key focus will be on the consumption model. More companies, rather than procuring their equipment as an OpEX now, are looking at CapEX, and hence a consumption of the on-demand model. There is a proliferation of different types of services – platform as a service, application as a service, management services – all these are different variations of services in the consumption model. I believe that these will be the driving forces for the coming year.
Top tech trends for channel community
The biggest trend that I see is the cloud getting more mature as a technology and becoming a stable revenue stream for customers. I believe organisations are now moving towards technologies around multi-cloud and hybrid clouds and that is where Dell EMC’s business focus would be for 2019. Companies are beginning to move their workload both across the different public clouds and from public to private, which is one of the biggest trend happening now. The other big trend happening in terms of technology is hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) which continues to grow very rapidly. In fact, recently when Dell EMC announced its Q3 earning results, we shared that we shipped over a billion-dollars’ worth of VXrail since we launched and it has grown triple digit last year.
Channel directions for partners
I really want our partners to make the transformation from just being a hardware reseller to reselling solutions that meet business objectives. They may not be able to move 100 per cent in quick time but they can at least start the journey. It will be a good start for partners to sell more lines of business at their customer end, for example, they can sell storage or networking products than just selling a server. We would like our partners to give us candid feedback. While we are doing well in our results, we definitely do not want to be overconfident. We remain humble as we want to hear the feedback as there might be many things we still need to improve on.
Majority of the companies and organisations have recently been focused towards multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. They have realised that it’s not just about keeping your data on-prem, but it’s about the combination of both. In emerging countries like India, many channels tend to be more infrastructure focused. Hence, there is a dire need for partners to move from being a pure infra selling company to transform themselves to address new trends of multi-cloud, hybrid cloud and consumption model.
