It seems Dell has now digested the $3 billion acquisition of Perot Systems and the buzzword in the company is ?solutions and services?. After catering to different segments like healthcare services, education infrastructure, mobile phone in hardware, the company is now looking at bringing its retail solutions in the country this year. ?We have not launched our retail solutions in India, but it is coming up this year in the country. We are shifting towards services with the changing customer requirements,? says Amit Midha, president?Dell, Consumer Small and Medium Businesses (Asia Pacific & Japan). In a recent interaction, he discusses the focus areas, emerging geographies, new customer demands and changing company portfolio of Dell with Diksha Dutta. Excerpts:

From being a pure PC vendor, Dell has now started performing in services and has entered different consumer segments. What is the dynamics behind this phase of change?

We are going through a transformation right now. We have a big play around retail and distribution at present. Though direct selling and online still exists, we have changed our manufacturing model to have more of outsource facility. This has generated flexibility to cope with the fast changing consumer needs. The combination of distribution and outsourcing manufacturing has contributed to a great set up for retail and consumers segment. As a result, our business in the consumer domain in India and China has taken off.

Geography wise, the strategy defining a combination of retail and original design manufacturers (ODM) has really worked out for us. Dell has changed quite a bit both from the sales and manufacturing side. This move was to support the emerging markets.

The other big change has happened on the solutions side. We started as a PC company.

But today if you look globally, more than 50% of our profitability comes from data centres, software services, etc. It is a huge swing that has happened over the past few years. The solution business has changed a lot and it will only grow in the near future. We have invested significantly in buying storage companies. We spent more than $3 billion to buy Perot systems, which is now Dell services. And most recently we announced $900 million dollars investment to buy Compellent, a leading global technology provider that pioneered automated tiered storage.

So from where does the major chunk of your solutions business come?

Storage requirements will be big and the data centres is where we want to be. This is a big investment area on the solution side. We are also concentrating on healthcare solutions as we manage 2,500 hospitals across the globe. We also focus on retail solutions and education.

At present, the major chunk is around the infrastructure services to support and enable data centre platform and client platform. The value added services on the healthcare, education and financial side is still a big portion but is less than half of our business. Thus, still a major portion of our revenues comes from support services.

However, at Max hospital, the entire IT infrastructure is managed by Dell. In education, we are trying to partner with the state governments to show them the relevance of connected classrooms. Depending on the government opinion, we can scale it up. Right now is in the pilot stage. Though we have not launched our retail solutions in India as yet, it is coming up this year. We will be having solutions such as point of sale, inventory management and replenishment to help predict how the customers requirements is changing.

How important is the consumer and SMB segment for Dell in the overall business?

Consumer and small medium businesses(CSMB) represent 50% of our global business. And in India, it is higher that 50%, and so is across Asia. We have almost 10,000 doors in china and 7,000 in India. That is a huge difference from what we had a two years ago.

What is driving this growth?

Everybody realises that the connectivity to internet is their way to make more money.

Fundamentally, internet has become the theme of our life be it Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or the ability to run business through internet. PC now has a killer application. Even the content is moving to smartphones, tablets and various other platforms. This what is driving the growth.

Are your services customers an extension of the previous customer engagements? Or is there a rage of new customers that Dell has won for its services business?

Perot Systems was a standalone company which brought us unique customers. But even Dell deals with fortune 500 companies globally and they were not necessarily with Perot. Thus, I think it is a mix of both new customers and old customers, and the acquisition was complementary. We have two billion conversations every year globally with various customers. This signifies our direct sales model.

You have also entered the mobile space. Do you feel this is the right time for this diversification in your business model?

The strategy is simple. We want to give the customers value and choice. Most of the existing mobile platforms are closed platforms. We realise that the smartphones are a ?computer on the go?. They are becoming powerful in processing life.

In the mobile space, consumers want to have the ability to use ?cloud on the go?, video chat, connect with PC, social networking and alike. We have phones specially designed for the Indian players. Whereas the existing and established players are not ready to redefine their economics. Smartphones is an area which will grow in triple digits for the coming years and we feel we can make a difference there.