Dell India will be 10,000 strong soon

Dell Inc., the $49 billion IT supplier, has announced that its employee headcount in India will touch 10,000 by the end of this year from the current 7,000-8,000.

The company also announced that India will be a competence centre for systems management software development.

Kevin Rollins, president & CEO, Dell, speaking to the Indian media for the first time after taking over as CEO of Dell said: "India is a vital market for Dell. We are building great relationships with customers here, and have talented colleagues developing technology and providing leading support for customers around the world. We currently employ 7,000-8,000 people in India and this number should reach 10,000 by the end of the year."

In addition to the employees, Dell India employs around 500 professionals for sales and marketing activities in the country.

Dell currently operates three contact support centres in India and is looking at adding more sites here. "In addition to Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chandigarh centres, we are constantly evaluating locations for expanding our operations here," said Rollins.

Teams at these locations offer multiple services to various Dell business segments, including sales, customer care, technical support, e-mail support and shared services. The centres are part of a global network of about 50 contact centres Dell operates around the world.

In addition to the tech support operations, Bangalore also hosts a sales and marketing office, a global product group focussed on development and testing for Dell's enterprise product line and a global software development centre.

He asserted that desktops will remain the core of Dell, around which a slew of services will be added. "We will never move away from this business. A few who have moved away from this business have done so is because they could not manage it better and not because it was not profitable," Rollins said, in an obvious reference to IBM exiting its PC business.

Rollins added that Dell in the near future will be known better as an total IT provider instead of being just a PC player. "Enterprise servers will be the next big thing for us as we push forward our growth strategy," Rollins said.

Commenting on the issue of Dell being at the centre of an offshoring controversy in which it shifted certain contact centre operations from India, Rollins asserted it was shuffling work with other centres and it was nothing to do with reducing work in India.

"Dell during that stage was doing too many things at too many places and then we said we need to go a bit slow and steady in the operations, which we did. Growth in India is an integral part of our strategy and will play a good part in our goal of being a $80 billion organisation in three to four years time," Rollins highlighted.