BANGALORE, INDIA: Angela Fox, executive director, solutions business, Dell APJ in an interaction with Srinivas Rasoor and Deepa Damodaran of CIOL. Excerpts:

CIOL: What is the transformation that is happening at Dell?

Angela Fox: The IT industry is evolving. We come from a background of supply chain excellence and efficiency and will continue to draw operational efficiency from those areas, as we continue to transform. Today for us it is more about ensuring total excellence and providing enabling technologies to companies in the journey to virtual areas.

In the last two years we have made significant investments in acquisitions, which have been a key part of our strategy to transform.

We targeted at companies which had innovative products and software intellectual properties (IPs), which will help us in creating differentiation for our customers.

Today cloud is on everybody's lips. These 12-15 acquisition made in the last few years also have cloud based solutions. Historically, we are not acquisitive in behaviour, however, with these new acquisitions we are positioning ourselves as a full service provider for our customers.

CIOL: What exactly will be Dell's role in the cloud space?

AF: Dell World 2011, held early this year, was more about our entering into the era of cloud. We will continue to play the infrastructure provider. And at the same time, we will also assist our customers in their virtualisation journey, right from hardware provisioning services, to assessment of consumer environment and etc.

So, for some it will be provisional technology, and for others it will be provisioning full spectrum of services or managed services, or outsourcing.

CIOL: Why did you go for so many acquisitions, when being a company of this size and scale your could have innovated in your own R&D?

AF: It is our philosophy to identify best of breed technology, which is innovative. We would have otherwise spent years and years in developing IPs internally, when we could have identified outstanding start-up organisations in the industry, which already have products out in the markets in areas where we could push investments and research and development activities and take it to the next level.

It also complements our strategy. We realised that we have reached an inflection point from where we have to evolve along with the industry, and so we need to be a solution provider in order to be a long term player.

So all of it were calculated decisions.

CIOL: Dell has always been a hardware company. So how difficult was it be for you to come into the services market targeting enterprises?

AF: One of our biggest challenges is to make people aware of our capability. We are working around regions and engaging with customers to ensure our presence known in the market, that we are no longer just a PC provider, but can also help with full complementary solution and provision it.