Suresh Vaswani, the President of Dell Services sat down on theCube at DellWorld 2012 with John Furrier and Dave Vellante. The Dell IT services division is an $8 billion and growing business. He shared his thoughts on this growth in services and Dell’s position on their services. The division has increased its global IT presence through a number of acquisitions and specific focus on a number of target markets.

Vaswani states that people often think of Dell as a product, but not services. If you look at some numbers, Dell services accounts for virtually half the manpower that Dell has. In fact, the scale of the business today is a billion plus in terms of size, while five to six years ago, most of the services were support and deployment. A large part of the business are services that are not tied to the rest of infrastructure, offerings include BFSI solutions, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, and some serious innovations in terms of customer application implementation. Dell also has a very strong security services business that is rated in the upper-most magic quadrant from Gartner. It is world class, innovative and manages as many as 32 billion security events daily. It is currently focused in North America, but plans on expanding.

The infrastructure and cloud consulting business focuses on integration, consulting and managing of the IT infrastructure for customers. Dell is focused on making clients technologies work well. The services are broad yet complete, and are competitive with the top service providers in the world. They also naturally augment and work with Dell technologies from end-user computing, converged storage, software products, enterprise solutions – services puts it all together. One of the biggest changes in services that Vaswani sees is about taking customers from a state where they were simply trying to do things cheaper and in scale and take them towards a transition into the future. Services are aligned with keeping the future of each customer in mind as well as the realities of customer legacy, and delivering a specific capability around such challenges such as application modernization. This modern services architecture are the root of many customer conversations as the enterprise is at a number of inflection points and looking to jump ahead in technology.

Vaswani’s services group is part of a single services group for all of Dell. They are not tied to any one technology, and are able to work with all the groups, yet still maintain their services business aside from that. Vaswani states that this flexibility and integration is part of their extra edge in the business.

Reflecting on a recent statement by Sam Palmisano that stated that IT businesses will eventually be commoditized, Vaswani responds to this in light of Amazon’s recent strategies. Dell’s services strategy is that at the end of the day, they are striving to be aligned with the customers private cloud infrastructures. This services model is designed to make the cloud work for their customers, with their on-premise and Dell technologies, on into the cloud and remain secure, flexible, and still deliver all the leverage of cloud advantages. Whether this is on private clouds, Dell’s public cloud or other public clouds, one focus is on true hybrid solutions. On their philosophy, Vaswani states:

“Dell will be the best private cloud services provider in the world.”

Some discussion was had around development services, where Vaswani shares that what Dell is seeing are a mix of customer objectives. Some do quite a bit of in-house development, others outsource a considerable amount. Dell’s developers and their services are looking what is happening in terms of mobility, making that transformational jump to make things work in a more mobile world and utilizing the best of tools, training, customer interaction, and design skills throughout.
Catch the interview: