Experience drastic cut in IT budgets

This is mainly due to drop in system innovations, reducing costs and increase in speed of doing business, says Dell

As most companies allocate about 80 percent of their IT budget for infrastructure maintenance and 20 percent for new business innovations, Dell officials feel this figure can be cut down from 80 percent to about 50 percent in the next six-seven years.

Talking to CIOL Bureau, Sameer Garde, General Manager – Services, Dell India said: "The reduction will be mainly due to the 50 percent drop in system innovations and also due to the reducing costs and increase in the speed of doing business."

Recently, India has been witnessing the introduction of two services, Dell's ProSupport for 'IT' and ProSupport for the 'End Users', aimed at improving local support for enterprise customers by improving turnaround times and offering the ability to fast-track requests.

Now Dell ProSupport assures its customers who add two to three servers every month that they should virtualize their hardware and data centers. "IT infrastructure is where it all starts, i.e., from data centers, servers to desktops. We have virtualized several customer's data centers from 200 to 15 servers thus reducing their costs," he adds.

Dell takes up turnkey projects on end-to-end solution that takes about six-eight weeks to complete. "While the assessment of the data centers takes two-six weeks the design implementation takes six-eight weeks," Garde says.

Reports indicate that Dell has invested about $6 billion in services alone during FY07, and this is likely to shoot up further with more offering in the service space. Having launched its service operations in India, Dell's ProSupport, a globally consistent, customer-driven support offering, spans Dell's commercial product and solutions portfolios.

Dell has distilled more than 10 service offerings down to two customizable packages with flexible options for service level and proactive management.

"ProSupport goes beyond reactive problem resolution and hardware support to include proactive management," says Garde. With the right options, customers can reduce technical incidents by as much as 37 percent and critical downtime by as much as 48 percent, Garde adds.

The company is targeting emerging enterprises with 200 to 1,500 employees, but don't have a help desk. "We are focusing on banking and financial institutions, BPO and also government institutions to offer our service portfolio," he says.

Dell Prosupport wing already has about 650 engineers in India and about 150 call center executives in India. The company offers same day support in 22 cities besides other services in over 300 towns across the country.