Dell Inc, which acquired US-based services firm Perot Systems for $3.9 billion five months ago, intends to convert India into its services hub as it transforms its service delivery methods in line with newer technology.
With the acquisition of Perot, which added around 8,500 people to Dell India’s rolls, India now accounts for about a quarter of the PC-maker’s global headcount of around 1 lakh. The Perot acquisition has doubled Dell’s services headcount to around 53,000 people, Peter Altabef, head for Dell Services, said.
“We will use India as a hub to provide services,” Altabef said. “We develop a large part of the intellectual property [designs] in our equipment in India. So we can both sell into India and retain it as a development base,” he said, without revealing hiring plans.
Altabef indicated that company will try to transform its service delivery model from one based on sending employees down its customers’ premises to get things done, to doing it remotely.
“The way services are delivered and consumed will change over the next decade. Instead of having large armies of people on location getting in the way of people actually making money, we can do it remotely,” he said.
For this, the company will develop its existing tools for remote infrastructure management.
“For example, we are working with a large global bank that wants to move from servers to the cloud. It also wants to upgrade around 80,000 PCs to Windows 7. With our tools, we can remotely take all of their computer images and test to see if they work on Windows 7. We can check the currently installed applications for compatibility with Windows 7,” he said.
Dell’s acquisition of Perot was seen as part of a larger trend in which pure hardware companies are increasingly diversifying their businesses into services and software.
Altabef said the company would try to compete with the others using technology and by pushing its hardware advantage.
“Customers are increasingly going to look to a single source; they don’t want to go to silos. We can manage what we have sold. Wherever we sell hardware, we can sell services that are attached, and not attached to the hardware. We are one of the few players that have the entire range of services,” he said.
While numbers seemed to indicate a stable headcount at the firm, the company was non-committal on increasing headcount.
Instead, it said, with more and more cloud and remote services, revenue will not be proportionate to headcount.
“Next generation of services work will be to divorce revenue and labour. As we start developing the advanced tools, you will see us having the ability to divorce the two,” Altabef said.
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