Dell Canada sees the server market moving away from purchasing boxes to a more compute-centric model that simplifies workloads and helps the enterprise solve business challenges – and the line of business is taking a bigger role than before.
According to market research firm IDC Corp., HP led the worldwide server market in the first quarter of 2015 with 24.9 per cent of the market, closely followed by Dell with 18 per cent of the market. IBM followed with 13.2 per cent, with Lenovo and Cisco rounding out the top five. According to IDC Canada, in Canada Dell retained the top unit share position at 33.1 per cent, and was second in revenue for x86 servers in Q1.
Worldwide, Dell has seen substantial growth in density-optimized and rack-optimized server revenue, the trends are different in Canada said Carolyn Rollins, director of marketing with Dell Canada. In Canada, she said Dell is seeing far more investment in areas such as high-performance computing (HPC) and big data analytics.
“In Canada, Dell is still tops in x86 servers, but we’re talking more about products and solutions that offer more flexibility in infrastructure by focusing more on workload and their business needs,” said Rollins. “Cost-effective solutions and building a more efficient platform that lets them leverage management technologies.”
As Dell talks more with customers about HPC and big data, Rollins said it’s engaging other areas of the business to help them make better, more conscious business decisions as it relates to the growth of their business. The conversation is expanding beyond the IT department to how Dell can help business units such as finance, operations, sales and marketing take the copious amounts of data they’ve built for themselves and leverage to make meaningful business decisions.
“Our vision is to help them take that data and become more predictive about what’s going to happen,” said Rollins. “It’s about empowering those organizations to be able to make that data more predictive to help them anticipate what’s going to happen in the future.”
Finance, marketing and sales are the key business units that Dell wants to work with, and Rollins said the successful IT organizations are developing strong business relationships within their organizations, and sitting at the table becoming trusted advisors to line of business leaders and making recommendations to solve business problems based on their knowledge of how the business works. Other IT organizations are still challenged by how to translate technology into business needs.
“It’s really our mandate to broker those relationships,” said Rollins. “A lot of the requests are coming from the finance marketing and sales organizations, and because we’ve built such strong relationships with our customers those organizations we continue to work within the organization to bring them together.”
While HP remains on top of the global server revenue rankings, with the company set to split into two separate businesses this fall – HP Inc. and HP Enterprise – there may be an opportunity for competitors such as Dell to gain ground. Having already undergone its own transformation when founder Michael Dell took the company private, expect Dell to position itself as the last true end-to-end solution vendor left standing, from endpoint to data centre.
“We’ve heard loud and clear from customers they’d like a tech provider that knows and understands their business from end to end, and it’s important we know and understand all aspects of their business,” said Rollins. “Dell will be the last end to end solution provider in the tech world. With many of our acquisitions from security to end devices to backend infrastructure, it’s an exciting time to be at Dell as we’ll end up being the only vendor that can provide those end-to-end solutions for our customers.”