Dell to focus on products, services for SMEs in Korea

Dell Korea is putting a stronger focus on the mid-size market involving enterprise solutions and services as it looks to transform into an end-to-end solution provider.

Philip Davis, vice president of enterprise solutions in the Asia-Pacific and Japan at Dell Global, also said that its Korean office had been going through a fairly significant transformation over the past four to five years and that it has secured over 23 percent in server unit shipments to the country in the third quarter of this year.

“One in four servers shipped into Korea is now a Dell server,” he said in a recent interview with The Korea Herald. “Storage business is also growing five to six times faster than the overall market growth. The networking market is also growing five to six times faster.”

With the global IT firm establishing its Korean office in 1995, it has shifted away from only making personal computers and toward the commercial sector.

“During the early part, we were focused on the laptop and PC industry and we were very disruptive to the cost of that,” said Davis. “(But) when you look at the cost of managing and provisioning data centers, we see just as much opportunity to be disruptive in that … We’ve been strengthening server, storage, networking, services, security, and all the things that really take to manage, deploy and run a data center.”

As part of the company’s effort to concentrate on the mid-size market ― firms with 100-5,000 employees ― it will continue to be more flexible in its channel partners.

“We’ve formed a global commercial channel, which is a standardized worldwide program, and the elements of the program include PartnerDirect for those who want a more direct relationship,” he said.

“Most of our focus in Korea is in (PartnerDirect). They tend to be single, first-tier models and they sell to local customers. They have strong relationships with local customers and integrate a broader solution for the customers.”

Claiming that Dell is well suited to meet the mid-size market, the firm is willing to provide solutions that are more integrated, easier to deploy and less costly, and then scale them up as its customer grows, according to Davis.

Dell has established a dedicated channel team in Korea in order to target that specific group and help expand its presence in that market.

“Building that team gives us better reach and better training, better consistency that our channel partners like,” he said. “We have also more than doubled our specialist organization in the last two years so they could help when in a complex and technical cycle.”

Aside from the expansion of channel partners, Davis also emphasized that Dell strives to offer a more open system, moving away from lock-in and less proprietary systems of its competitors.

For example, a number of storage vendors force customers to rip out the platform and repurchase all software in the storage industry. However, Dell has enabled end-users to upgrade the platform instead.

“We’ve moved away from the concept of rip and replace and we have seen customers have systems that are eight to 10 years old and they continue to upgrade,” he said. “Once you purchase the software, you never have to repurchase it.”

As for its view of the Korean market, the Asia-Pacific region including Korea and Japan has been the most heavily invested area in the last few years, recording improved growth.

“We’re very committed to the Korean market and have been growing here, so we continue to make more investments,” Davis said.

By Cho Ji-hyun (sharon@heraldcorp.com)