Building Bharat - Nagpur Chapter

"The winter capital of Maharashtra" Nagpur, also known as the second greenest city in the country, is an emerging metropolis in India and has been able to hold a prominent position in the business and economy of Maharashtra State.

The ‘orange city’ is coupled with growth triggers like the construction of the east-west and north-south corridors, proposed investments in the multimodal transport hub, development of the special economic zone; the revival of industries in the Vidarbha region, and stimulation of economic growth.

The 'Tiger capital of India' is proposed as one of the most acceptable Smart Cities in Maharashtra and maintains the top ranking among 100 cities in India. It is the 13th largest city in India by population census and is also projected to be one of the five fastest-growing cities in the world from 2019 to 2035, with an average growth of 8.41 percent.

Nagpur is a hub for education and health-related services for the population living within a 500- kilometer radius, including the neighboring states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Andhra Pradesh, and with the increase in population, propelled by manufacturing and service industries in and around Nagpur, there is a huge demand for infrastructure development and rising business opportunities in various sectors, including MSME and retail, and IT being an integral part of it.

To tap the emerging possibilities and growth of these non-metro cities, CRN India and Express Computer, the two leading IT publications from The Indian Express Group, in association with Dell Technologies and Redington India, organized a mega-conference, Building Bharat, for the channel partners operating in Nagpur on October 7th, 2022. The conference witnessed participation from over 35 SMEs in the city.

As part of this new market connect initiative, the channel partners got the opportunity to: discover collaborative ways to work with Dell Technologies; benefit from various incentives that are being offered by them; identify new growth opportunities; and align with Dell, which has products and solutions that are in great demand and assist them in framing their growth strategies.

They also got insights into how they can help their customers enhance workforce productivity with Dell’s next-generation laptops, desktops, and workstations and determine the growing demand for robust backend IT infrastructure, including servers and storage, to support the digitalisation efforts of their customers.

The first session was an interesting presentation, "Winning in the data era with Dell technologies," by Khalid Shaikh, Systems Engineer, Channel Pre-sales West, Dell Technologies India.

Addressing the gathering, Shaikh said, "With the global economy going digital, the organisations must transform. IDC estimates that by 2022, the global economy will reach digital supremacy with 65 percent of the GDP driven by products and services from digitally transformed enterprises."

IDC also estimates that over 59 zettabytes of data were created, captured, copied, and consumed globally in 2020. Organisations are not only challenged with the management of massive amounts of data, but they are also under pressure to realise more value from the data. "As a result, we believe that every organisation needs to be a digital organisation powered by and running in a multi-cloud world," he said.

Highlighting the growing importance of digital transformation, Shaikh mentioned, “The right combination of data and software enables digital transformation”. These ingredients, when assembled in the right way, can fuel competitive advantage by maximising the power of data.

Elaborating on Dell's portfolio, Shaikh stated that Dell Technologies is the industry leader across every major storage category and offers a complete portfolio of powerful, efficient, and reliable infrastructure. Dell's infrastructure solutions portfolio includes best-of-breed hardware and software solutions spanning the categories of data storage, servers, data protection, and converged and hyper-converged infrastructure and networking.

During his presentation, Shaikh also made the audience aware of Dell's products Powerstore and VxRail. "Powerstore is designed for the data era and is capable of handling any workload and providing efficiencies without compromise," he said, adding that "VxRail today is the world's No. 1 HCI platform with over 12,400 customers and has generated more than the US$ 6 billion in revenue."

Rajat Srivastava, Partner Account Manager, Dell Technologies, took the dais as the second speaker and spoke about the hybrid workplace. Rajat mentioned, "We are making devices designed to make work easier and collaborate and connect better, irrespective of wherever or however we work."

Speaking about Dell's portfolio, he said, "With a new portfolio of intelligent, collaborative, and sustainable devices, Dell is transforming work experiences to give people greater flexibility to work from anywhere."

"Our Optiplex Series of laptops and desktops is one of the most popular series and has a lot of adaptable form factors with the right price performance, and our Latitude series of laptops comes with Accidental Damage Protection (ADP), which gives customers protection against accidental damage for three years," he added. The devices are built to ensure secure work. Srivastava explained with an example, he said, “the Latitude 9420 and 9520 deliver advanced security features like SafeShutter, the industry’s first automatic webcam shutter that knows when to automatically open or close by syncing with your video conferencing applications, so you can work securely and confidently from anywhere."

The delegates appreciated the presentation by Dell representatives and were vocal about the company’s seamless service delivery and customer-centric approach.

Prashant Pahade, Head-IT, Lata Mangeshkar Hospital, said, "I got more information on Dell’s new products and offerings. I had partnered with them in my previous organisation, JSW. My current organisation uses HP, but after this presentation, I have decided to partner with Dell because I trust the line of products and services they have to offer. There is something for every size and type of customer.

The co-founders of Infimetrics Info Solutions Private Limited, Nitin and Sujata Awade, expressed their delight in being a part of the Building Bharat Nagpur conference. They mentioned, "We got to know about the vast product lines of Dell, which earlier we were unaware of." Adding further, they said, "Dell is giving customers like us an edge in today’s digital world. We’ll ask our IT team to check out the products that Dell is offering and get the best deal possible. "

The ‘Building Bharat’ Nagpur chapter concluded successfully. The delegates expressed appreciation and were in consensus with each other about the fact that Dell Technologies has products and services in the fields of scale-out architecture, converged infrastructure, and private cloud computing and have come up with a technology solution for every type of customer.