Over the next four years, Kevin Rollins, president and CEO for Dell Inc. sees great growth for Dell Canada and outlined his vision for the company in this country at a question and answer session moderated by IDC Canada in Toronto this week.
“Dell Canada has done a superb job. We are number one in all product categories but that is not sufficient.
A number of things we like to do here is to continue to grow the business in services, servers, enterprise products and printing and imaging,” said Rollins.
He added Dell plans on growing its worldwide business from US$50 billion to US$80 billion over the next four years. Rollins stated about 80 per cent of that growth will come from the non-PC market and 55 per cent will come from outside the United States.
Michelle Warren, an IT analyst with Evans Research Corp. in Toronto said Rollins goals are realistic.
“Services is just a huge industry now and there are nice revenues with servers and storage. [Those are] three areas where Dell can really grow,” she said. Dell’s services include managed, professional and deployment offerings.
In addition to growing its business in those three areas, Rollins also wants to grow the talent base in Canada in order to send seasoned Dell managers to emerging countries like China and India.
“We believe if we are going to grow in the countries around the world …. we need to put resources in countries to build those economies,” he said. Rollins added Dell will look to Canada’s seasoned managers, and the know-how they have, to go to other parts of the world and help Dell grow the business there.
At the moment, Rollins does not have exact numbers on how many managers he wants to “export” but hopes to get as many as he can. He estimates up to 20 executives could be sent around the globe.
“Today I would be stealing from a business that is growing and very profitable [in Canada] to move to an emerging business but we are looking in the future when our market share grows and growth slows a little bit. That is when we will look to export,” he added.
Warren said Rollins’ comparison between the Eastern and Western world was a notable comment. “In the Western world we do have very good managers, very thought-driven people. We have the ability to produce people who can look at the big picture and dissect and analyze from an operational and execution strategic standpoint.”
Recently, Dell’s customer service has come under attack from a University of Michigan survey, which saw Dell’s customer satisfaction rate decrease from the previous year. Rollins said he still had not looked at the findings but does know one thing.
“No matter what you do, you have to do better and the bar for customer satisfaction is always rising. We will have to see what the survey says and make adjustments accordingly,” said Rollins.