Sonia Bashir Kabir heads Dell Bangladesh and is the only female who is leading a multinational technology business in not just Bangladesh but also in South Asia.
In a recent interview with The Daily Star, Kabir spoke about Dell's products, solutions, services, market positioning and its plan for Bangladesh.
End-to-end hardware solution provider
Most of the people have this misconception that Dell only sells desktop and laptops. But Dell is an end-to-end hardware solution provider - which means that Dell also sells servers, switches, routers, storage and peripherals also which includes projectors, batteries, printers, monitors and more. Dell's competitors are IBM, HP, Cisco and EMC. Dell goes head to head with all these major brands in the Bangladesh market and is ramping up speed to get more aggressive.
“For your hardware solution if you take storage from EMC, servers from IBM and switches from Cisco and if something goes wrong, which vendor do you go after? My pitch to my clients is they focus on their core competency and let Dell take away their pain points. Dell is a one-stop shop - all you have to do is just make one call to Dell to solve the problem. It's like using one arrow to shoot and kill.”
Number 1 in South Asia
According to a just released IDC (a market research, analysis and advisory firm specialised in information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology) report, Dell is now number one in the South Asia.
“We are doing very well in this region,” Kabir said.
In Bangladesh Dell's biggest customers are the Financial Services Industry (FSI), the Government of Bangladesh and Telcos. Dell is now eyeing the Small and Medium Business (SMB) and has worked out an impressive “Go to market strategy” which they rolled out early this month.
Dell's mission is to touch every customer's lives from home user to corporate. Dell has its products classified into two segments consumer and commercial. Dell plans to invest heavily to tap into the consumer market.
“We are betting on the consumer market of 160 million people and we are seeing growth in every quarter,” she said.
Dell is number one in the South Asia in both the consumer and commercial segments.
Cloud computing
Like other companies, Dell is also focused on moving towards the cloud.
“I think it's very important for Bangladesh. We don't really need stand alone software or hardware here. It's an over kill at some point.” She said everything is moving towards a service now. “Infrastructure is a service, software is a service and so is the platform.”
However, Bangladesh has to wait for some time for the cloud computing to kick in, because business models have to be rolled out.”
Service drives future sales
Dell is providing after sale service for desktop and laptop PCs through Computer Source Ltd.
“Dell is playing in the server, storage and switch space, we are dealing with the mission critical applications. If a bank faces a problem with our product, they don't have the time to wait for Dell to provide delayed service. Instant support is needed to solve the problem. We will be investing in DSP (Dell Service Provider) for our enterprise products - there will be a team of service technicians and inventory /spare parts to provide 24x7 service. Stay tuned, as Dell's best is yet to come.”
Dell's plan for Bangladesh
“We are working with the Ministry for Women and Children affairs and Ministry of Science and ICT. Our plan is to engage in meaningful CSR projects where a difference is actually made in people's lives. Cannot comment much as we are in the early stages of formulating projects but we will get the help of media to share what we will be doing.”
“Our corporate headquarters team is constantly looking into acquisitions to complement our line of products and investing in R&D. I am confident we will continue to grow aggressively and give all our competitors a run for their money as we go after market share. “
Bangladesh has no legacy issues and morphs to state of the art technology. We are a nation known to leapfrog and acquire the best. There is a lot of work that needs to be done to make our Prime Minister's dream of Digital Bangladesh come true. Dell will be by her side.”
When asked, Kabir did not comment on the size of the business in Bangladesh but informal market estimates indicate Dell is well positioned as a USD $100m per year business in Bangladesh.
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