Dell Technologies: Asia’s go-to digital transformation solutions provider
Dmitri Chen, Vice President of APJ GTM Strategy and Programs, VMware and Strategically Aligned Businesses at Dell Technologies, speaks with Business Chief about challenges to digital transformation in the region and how Dell is driving accelerated digital efficacy
Today, there is perhaps no better source for cutting-edge insights into the state of play in Asia than Dell Technologies. Dmitri Chen, Vice President of Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) GTM Strategy and Programs, VMware and Strategically Aligned Businesses at Dell Technologies, summarises this view succinctly: “There’s never been a better time to be in technology. There’s never been a better time to be in the Asia region.” Formed through the merger of Dell Technologies and EMC Corp in 2016, the firm’s own recent experience of disruption, integration, adaptation and success have positioned it as an ideal digital transformation specialist. Not to mention its extensive offering, a holistic and dynamic portfolio that can be tailored to clients from a range of industries at every stage of their transformation journeys. “We came together in one of the largest mergers in history over 24 months ago,” says Chen. “We integrated two large IT organisations while adding performance, capacity and resilience across multiple clouds. On top of that, we enhanced the level of commerce that we’re able to support for our partners and millions of customers.” The evolution of the merged companies’ offering is strengthened further by its adoption of an Agile software development methodology, echoing the approach taken by Pivotal Software, a firm in which Dell holds a 70% stake.
VMWare, also majority-owned by Dell, has had a similarly profound effect upon Dell Technologies' capabilities. “We’ve extended our modern, hybrid multi-cloud environment with VMWare,” says Chen.” It gives us a single control plane across multiple clouds. Sometimes that means our own data centres, and we have about 19 of those globally.” These factors, as well as ongoing infrastructural evaluations geared towards accelerated value and time to market, have had a staggering impact on Dell Technologies' efficiency. “We’ve been able to lower our general infrastructure costs by about 40% since the merger, and we’ve reduced our provisioning costs by 80%. Our overall infrastructure utilisation rates have improved by 10-30%, depending on the environment. That’s pretty substantial. We take a lot of these learnings and share them with customers.” This self-sufficient internal transformation provides the perfect use case for the firm’s clients. “The cool thing is that we’re able to demonstrate that our approach and portfolio really works, and can help with our customers’ biggest challenges,” enthuses Chen.
The APJ market is no different to other regions in that the challenges it faces are manifold and complex, but nonetheless, Dell Technologies takes a particularly tailored approach to operations across Asian markets. Dell Technologies’ Digital Transformation Index 2018, which surveyed 4,600 global leaders from mid-to-large-sized companies across the region, found that 95% of companies in APJ are encountering roadblocks during their digital transformations, particularly in terms of technological skills gaps. The consequence of these challenges is highlighted by findings that only 6% of the region’s companies can be considered ‘Digital Leaders’, with 84% of respondents believing that digital transformation is lagging across their respective organisations and 35% worrying that they could be left behind in the march towards fully digitalised industries. “In many respects, the Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China region is emerging as a source of innovation in the way it fosters new business models and embraces emerging technologies,” said Amit Midha, President of Asia Pacific and Japan and Global Digital Cities at Dell Technologies, according to the report’s press release. “This is a tremendous opportunity for the region – but it’s also a determined period in time. To secure their digital future and progress with innovation, businesses must accelerate their transformation – rather than slow down.” Dell Technologies is not only poised to enable capitalisation on this opportunity, but it already has a plethora of successes under its belt.
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Chen highlights KFC Singapore as one of the many customers that have been significantly impacted by Dell Technologies. “They had to go through a significant IT transformation, moving from traditional IT operations to a modern data centre approach,” he explains. “They had to do that because they had an expectation from the business to transition their IT operation from a cost centre to a profit centre. The outcome, essentially, was that they improved their speed of data delivery across their infrastructure by around 57% and they’re now able to provision new server nodes in minutes instead of days.” As well as becoming significantly more efficient with their data storage and cutting down on associated costs, KFC Singapore has also achieved almost 100% uptime for its business-critical applications. “They did all that with the solutions from our portfolio, mainly centred around hyperconverged infrastructure and data protection solutions,” says Chen. Another success story comes with Japan’s Mitsubishi Motors, who wanted to develop a desktop virtualisation that would enable their engineers and production teams to access data more easily and cut time spent managing various machines. “They essentially established a new remote data access architecture for the workforce, and essentially enhanced their design processes from a digital standpoint: they were able to cut their design load times by 92%, and they’re also now able to do desktop deployment.” In a company with as many engineers as Mitsubishi, across multiple environments, the positive implications of desktop deployment for productivity are huge. “They were able to cut the deployment time from 80 hours to one, whilst cutting the amount of data they needed to store by around 87%. They achieved that through solutions from Dell, such as PowerEdge rack servers and our XtremeIO flash storage arrays.”
In sum, Dell Technologies is not only well-positioned to cater to myriad needs of enterprises in markets across APJ, but it has the capacity to zero in on the specifics of individual customers and drive impactful digital transformations. “The good news for us is that, if we focus on being patient and really understanding the customer’s business, we can help them to architect something that’s highly differentiated,” says Chen. “It may mean that a lot of the use cases are different, even within the same industry, but it helps our customers maintain their level of competitive edge within their respective vertical.”
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