Transformation Tour - Surat Chapter

Famous for its multi-billion dollar diamond industry, Surat is among India's fastest- growing cities. Considered the country's first 'smart city’, Surat is the major economic and commercial center of Gujarat. The presence of multiple MNC IT giants has made Surat a technology hub, making Surat the second most important IT hub in Gujarat, after Ahmadabad.

Located at the mouth of the Tapti River, Surat is an architecturally rich city in the western part of Gujarat and is the fastest-growing city in terms of economic prosperity. While there are more than 41,300 industries already operating in Surat, the city is also emerging as the top place for companies who are looking to open offices in the state of Gujarat.

Around 24 percent of small-scale industries relate to textile industries only. Some of the other areas of SSI include diamond cutting and polishing, zari making, chemical dyeing and printing, and allied engineering equipment manufacturing industries. As these companies take up digitalisation, it directly benefits the IT industry in Surat.

To tap the emerging possibilities and growth of this non-metro city, CRN India and Express Computer, the two leading IT publications from The Indian Express Group, in association with Dell Technologies and TechData, organised a mega-conference, Transformation Tour, for the emerging businesses operating in Surat on November 23rd, 2022. The conference witnessed participation from over 40 SMEs in the city.

As part of this new market connect initiative, the business organizations 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, every organisation needs to transform into a digital organisation, powered by data, running in a multi-cloud world and the key ingredient to making it happen is the right combination of data and software. These ingredients assembled in the right way can fuel competitive advantage by maximising the power of data.

Elaborating on Dell's portfolio, Shaikh stated,"Dell Technologies focuses on empowering the IT organisations to evolve so that it becomes an innovation engine for their business. Dell Technologies is the industry leader across every major storage category and offers a complete portfolio of powerful, efficient, and reliable infrastructure.” Adding further, he stated, "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." Dell technologies' APEX portfolio spans APEX Data storage services, APEX Cloud services, and APEX Custom solutions.

During his presentation, Shaikh also informed the audience about Dell's products, Powerstore and VxRail. He mentioned, "VxRail today is the world's No. 1 HCI platform with over 12,400 customers and has generated more than US$ 6 billion in revenue.” He further stated, “Our product Powerstore is the most powerful tool and a complete game changer that helps businesses innovate and thrive in a rapidly changing world. It is designed for the data era and is capable of handling any workload and providing efficiencies without compromise.”

The attendees also shared their views on the conference and spoke highly about Dell’s products. Dr. Ami Choksi, Associate Professor & Head, Computer Engineering Dept., C.K Pithawalla College of Engineering & Technology, appreciated the quality of products Dell had to offer. Appreciating the wide range of products she mentioned, "We have been using Dell PCs for quite some time and the experience so far has been great. Most of the products we use are from Dell. We are planning to build AI Labs in our institution and have strong hopes from Dell, to offer the best services in the market.”

Similar views were shared by Surbie Wattal, Head IT – AM/NS Power Hazira Limited. She said, "We have been using Dell for the past 10 years and have received no complaints, our hardware, and storage are from Dell, and now since we are moving to the cloud-based version we require cloud-based storage and SAP HANA, which I am sure Dell will help us at the best quotation available.”

Professors, Dr. Bhavesh Gohil and Dr. Dipti Rane from Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, expressed their delight in being a part of the Building Bharat conference. They mentioned, "We got to know about the vast product lines of Dell, which earlier we were unaware of. Through conferences like Building Bharat, Dell is connecting with the market and allowing customers to explore more of its solutions based on their requirements". Expressing their keen interest, they further added, "We really look forward to grabbing some of these technologies for our institution and providing the best quality technology to our students. We are already a customer of Dell and foresee continuing this relationship in the future"

The 13th conference in the series of Transformation Tour - Surat chapter ended on a high note. The delegates expressed appreciation for Dell’s product lines and unanimously agreed on how Dell has come up with a technology solution for every type of customer.