HP split into HP Inc and HP Enterprise in 2014 and HP Enterprise further spun off its low-margin IT services division in December while its biggest competitor Dell has been consolidating to turn into a one-stop-shop for all IT needs. In an interview with BusinessLine, Som Satsangi, Vice-President and GM, Enterprise Group, HPE India, talked about how the move has helped HP turn more nimble and agile, which is helping it gain marketshare. Edited excerpts:

Like most of the other players, it’s a wait and watch time for us as well. We have been explaining to IT Ministry and DeiT the true meaning of manufacturing. Simply assembling the components cannot be termed as manufacturing. While at one side, the government is assuring full support and we need to commit ourselves, all the organisations currently are just waiting for the opportune time. We are also waiting for some policy framework in this direction. We also have to look at the challenges associated with setting up manufacturing unit in the country with so many Ministries involved. By just assembling, we wouldn’t be able to create any job opportunities.

If you see any server, 70 per cent of the cost is just three components — CPU, memory and disk drive. Organisations like HP or Dell or any other can’t manufacture either of these components. So, 70 per cent of local manufacturing is out of question. Unless Intel or AMD decide to set up the Fab in India, we can’t add any value.

That’s why in the server space, make-in-India hasn’t moved forward.

We are working closely with the government. Recently, the government has asked for our inputs in terms of what help we need, what manufacturing is possible, how much integration is possible in first few years. Our worldwide supply chain is involved and we are supplying all the information to the government and the industry. But my personal view is that, it is going to take time.

Post the Dell-EMC merger, Dell is positioning itself as a one-stop-shop for all enterprise IT needs, while your capabilities are limited post the split. How is that impacting your business?

When we were one big enterprise, we used to sell anything and everything of technology. Customer decided which products they would prefer to buy from which vendors based on the merit of the product. For instance, if a customer brought printers from us, there was guarantee he would also buy servers from us and vice-versa. So, we used to win customers based on our merit.

The Dell-EMC combined entity may not necessarily help them in a big way – either from the customer acquisition or product selling standpoint. For example, if a customer buys EMC storage, it is not necessary they will buy Dell servers and vice-versa. On the contrary, we see their customers and partners are confused. In this commotion, we have successfully migrated a lot of Dell-EMC customers towards our side.

While post-split we have become a smaller entity, the decision making is much faster. Now, we have become more focused and if you look at some of the key innovations that have come from HPE in the last 6-9 months, it is a testimony in itself. Being a small and nimble company, we are able to make more investments in the core technologies that are going to make difference.

IoT is a very interesting subject for HPE. We are one of the few companies outside the large telcos, where we provide end-to-end IoT platform solutions. This strength comes from Communication & Media business where we are traditionally strong. We were first ones to create vendor agnostic IoT platform. Those businesses using IoT will be successful if they can catch the information at the edge, process it and bring some kind of meaningful insights.

In fact, we launch Edgeline servers, which are Edgeline EL 1000 and Edgeline EL 4000. And these servers have the capabilities of server, storage and networking built in to one along intelligent data analytics capability with Vertica, which is embedded in these servers. These servers can capture and analyse data from IoT sensors and through algorithms decide which is the most relevant data mostly 2-3 per cent and this is moved to the datacentre and back to the sensors where the action needs to be taken.

In terms of gaining market share, our first priority is to capture the hybrid environment. With our converged and hyper converged solution and 3PAR strategy, we have gained grounds. We have entered into strategic partnership with SAP for HANA and this is one big bet for us where we have made huge investments. In the enterprise space on HANA landscape, we are the single largest infrastructure player. This has given us advantage to move ahead of the competition.

On the datacentre side, our focus and strategy would be on SAP HANA, hyper converged and converged systems and working with 3PAR all flash storage and StoreVirtual.

We were initially struggling on our Wi-Fi strategy but with the acquisition of Aruba, we are doing fairly well in this competitive scenario. We have picked up some of the large Wi-Fi projects in Smart Cities. Besides, we have bagged Wi-Fi projects from some of the large enterprises.

While Dell-EMC were looking at integration and sorting out who will do what in terms of organisational changes and partner ecosystem, we were busy addressing our customers and partners with a key focus on our core capabilities and foundation.

Firstly, in India, we are witnessing that a lot of tier-II and -III service providers like Netmagic, CtrlS, and Sify have become really strong. We are going to put more focus on such tier-II and tier-III players because they are consolidating by addressing the mid-tier and SMB market. On one side, Microsoft and Amazon have grown their business from the service provider standpoint. Now the next level of growth is coming from these service providers. We are putting up a robust plan around these players and trying to figure out how best we can leverage this growth.

Secondly, from the go-to-market (GTM) perspective, the entire alliance / India system integrators (SIs) piece was driven by APAC. But now, we have decided to bring it back to the country to have a better control. It is because we know the trends in India and what each industry vertical is looking for. Here, we have tied up with ISVs who are focusing on deploying solutions at each of the industry verticals. Hence, SIs and alliances have become very critical and we have combined our industry vertical approach with this move. With this, we are able to bring in solution-centric approach while dealing with customers.

Thirdly, on the SMB front, our strategy is very clear i.e. to work with partners and grow the business.

This space is also getting cannibalised with the growth of the tier-II and -III service providers. Hence, we are partnering with them to deploy various solutions.

Lastly, we are putting a lot of focus on flexible capacity and here we are trying to bring in the HPE financial services. In the large enterprises, we are going with our flexible capacity, wherein we are saying to our customers – you pay what you consume.

All-in-all, our core focus going forward is towards the GTM strategy and that is going to make the difference, whereas our competition is just looking at integrating the entire organisation.