​Australia a priority market for Michael Dell

Although Dell EMC operates in approximately 180 countries, not all of the products and services from the company’s bag of tricks are available everywhere.

When it comes to Australia, however, Michael Dell told ZDNet that Australia is pretty high up on the priority list, giving local organisations access to almost the entire Dell EMC stack ahead of many other countries.

“We have a tiered approach; we have a group of countries that are the big countries that we focus on first and Australia happens to be one of them,” he said, at the conclusion of the 2017 Dell EMC World conference in Las Vegas.

“Japan, China, India happen to be others in the region that are the biggest markets and markets we tend to focus on.”

With the tech giant’s founder eyeing long-term growth prospects in the greater Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region, he said there are other countries that offer Dell EMC “great opportunities”.

“We’ve been investing in Asia and Japan for a long time and we love our customers there. It’s a big part of our past, our present, and an even bigger part of our future,” Dell added.

The company chief did say that the dynamic of his company’s market share in many regions did shift with the $67 billion addition of EMC in September.

According to Matthew Zwolenski, Dell EMC’s CTO for Commercial in APJ, prior to the merger, each company had its respective strengths in the Australian market.

“EMC had a strength really around the high-end financial services, mining, and in the larger retail companies,” Zwolenski said, speaking with journalists on Wednesday.

“The top organisations really relied on the EMC brand and the low-risk technology to run their organisations. Bring Dell together, who had a real strength in the research side, high performance computing in government and research in universities, and the synergies from the two — what I’ve found — is covering almost every organisation.”

He said the scope and coverage of what companies in Australia engage Dell EMC for is now very strong.

“The largest accounts we have are in the financial services sector,” said Zwolenski, who joined the company from the EMC side. “By large, Australia has four or five large banks that spend a huge amount on IT and a few mining companies that spend a huge amount on IT.

“On a per customer level, the large revenues come from those; in the government space it’s fairly similar. They’re trying to innovate digitally, there’s a huge expenditure on technology, on leveraging data.”

Speaking of trends in the region, Zwolenski said Australia and New Zealand are generally leading in verticals such as cloud adoption, noting “a lot of innovation is happening there”,

Similarly, Amit Midha, president and EVP for APJ commercial at Dell EMC, said that although digital transformation tends to differ from country to country within the region, Australia and India are leading the way.

“But if you think about the most transformed, Australia is probably leading the way,” Midha said.

Australia’s eagerness to head to the cloud isn’t being praised by Midha, however.

“One of the things I do caution with customers is that digital transformation isn’t cloud-first, especially in Australia I feel that’s the thinking,” he said. “You need to think about digital transformation from the core, not from one technology, and not just hiring a chief digital officer.”

In the APJ region, Dell EMC boasts 40,000 team members at 121 facilities.

Disclosure: Asha McLean travelled to Dell EMC World as a guest of Dell EMC.