Dell eyes corporate clients, offers low-cost IT services

Dell, a leading products and services provider for information technology, zeroes in on corporate customers in Bangladesh, which is a key market for the company, said a top Dell official.

"We are mainly focusing on corporate clients with big demand for IT and computing requirements," Mike Tan, country manager of Dell Developing Markets Group, said in an interview with The Daily Star during his three-day visit to Dhaka on Tuesday.

"Over the years, we found that the big companies here install systems on an ad hoc basis. Moving forward, we have formed a strategy for customers to deploy IT in a systematic way, which is much more cost effective, " Tan added.

Tan also said Dell is still evaluating the need for a regional office in Bangladesh. "Bangladesh is one of the three key markets among the 14 developing markets," Tan said. The other two are Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Dell products and solutions are available in Bangladesh through local distributors -Information Solution Limited and Leads Corporation. These two companies have slightly

Mike Tan

different market coverage and customers segments.

The US-based company now has a parts exchange centre in Dhaka, which is managed by

its logistic partner Excel, a pure logistics provider, which is paid to stock up critical system parts, such as servers, storage products and notebooks.

"We want to make technology more accessible to the people of this country and as a technology vendor we are sharing knowledge and technology trends with the local IT players," Tan said mentioning that Dell is offering training for its partners.

Oracle, the global leader in database technology, is a key technology partner for Dell to help customers adopt a 'scale-out' or cost effective approach, which they are trying to implement in the country.

Dell and Oracle have worked together to make it easy to acquire, deploy and manage Oracle 9i on clustered PowerEdge servers running Linux.

About the role of the government here, the Dell official said the government should put right policies in place and encourage use of technology for a developing IT infrastructure.

The government should also make sure that the local companies are able to adopt the latest technologies to make them globally competitive, he said.