Senior VP says traditional business products remain key, but social media becoming a bigger focus, writes JJ WORRALL
Dell senior vice president and chief marketing officer Karen Quintos is backing social media to become a vital revenue stream for the company.
However, during a flying visit to Dell’s Dublin offices in Cherrywood, Quintos added that aside from its recently launched Social Media Services offering, overall Dell product development this year “won’t deviate” from established products such as notebooks, desktops and tablets, as well as infrastructure and cloud-based IT services.
A combination of advisory services, data analysis and “listening command centres” – which can allow customers to “monitor 25,000 conversations every single day” related to their brand – make up the company’s social media portfolio.
Quintos said it’s “too early to say” if these developments will translate into any jobs boost at the company’s Dublin or Limerick campuses any time soon.
Quintos said that the ability to turn Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook data into “sales leads” and marketing strategy statistics is the “crown jewels” of how to “use social media in the right way”. She added Dell is “talking” to LinkedIn regarding innovations in generating social media-based sales leads.
Three mistakes
Quintos, a regular Twitter user, added that at present there are “three main mistakes” that companies make when trying to use social platforms for marketing purposes. The biggest error “is not getting started”, she said, noting that social media engagement is an imperative as “if you’re not in these conversations they’re happening without you”.
The second mistake she mentioned was to follow an “if you build it, they will come” attitude, noting that businesses have to engage with users rather than the other way around.
The final stumbling block – and an area Dell will hope to profit from through its expertise – is that many businesses simply don’t “understand and utilise the richness of the analytics and the customer data you can get by mining” social media sites.
New revenue streams such as social media services are essential for the world’s third-largest PC maker following recent disappointing figures, including an 11 per cent decrease in revenue in the third quarter of 2012 and a 20 per cent decrease in PC shipments between October and December last year. Like traditional PC market rival HP, Dell has moved towards IT services and software development in search of profits as laptop and desktop sales flounder.
Indeed, services and software accounted for $3 billion of the $13.7 billion in Dell’s revenue in the third quarter of 2012, with some of the work responsible for this emanating from the Dell Solution Centre in Limerick.
Though with some analysts predicting HP will be broken up and sold off in the near future, Dell will be anxious to avoid some of its rival’s errors in these relatively new markets, including billions in hit-and-miss acquisitions over the past seven years.
Noting that there are “some questions” regarding HP’s strategy, Quintos emphasised that Dell is happy to be seen as a company with a wildly diverse business model, leaving it, she said, “uniquely positioned” to help clients deal with “big strategic questions” of any kind, whether they’re related to hardware, securing data, data storage or the cloud.
Recent acquisitions
For its part, Dell’s recent acquisitions include enterprise solutions provider Gale Technologies and data protection solutions provider Credant Technologies. While interestingly from an Irish perspective there was also the buyout last year of IT management company, Quest Software, which has a development centre based in Cork employing 200 people. These 200 are now counted among the 2,500 people employed by Dell throughout the country.
“Ireland is a very, very important market for Dell,” said Quintos, who spent part of her time in Dublin meeting with chief information officers (CIOs) from companies such as Bank of Ireland, The Irish Times, Ardagh Glass, Dublin Airport Authority and Deloitte.
The CIOs’ main interests lay in developments “surrounding cloud”, which led to Quintos talking in detail about the work done in the Cloud Research and Development Centre in Cherrywood.
She was keen to talk about the Dublin-based enterprise support team as well. “They have something like a 97 per cent customer satisfaction – 97 per cent! These are some of the highest calibre technical support agents that we have around the world,” she enthused.
Quintos didn’t comment on whether foreign direct investment in Ireland is likely to continue from multinationals such as Dell, in light of recent reports of large companies receiving favourable tax breaks in other European countries such as the UK, saying she doesn’t “understand enough of the specifics around what’s going on” in that space to venture into the argument.
She was, however, effusive in particular over the release of the company’s latest tablet device – the Latitude 10 Windows 8 tablet, which will be priced at around €500. Reviews have placed it in the business bracket of tablet devices, though Quintos said Dell wants its tablet range to compete in the commercial space with rivals such as Apple and Samsung as well.
“Tablets are a very busy market,” however she believes the attraction of the “secured, managed Windows 8 operating system” available with Dell slates will be of interest to both business clients and security-conscious consumers alike.
Global hub Dell's Irish operations
Dell Ireland is a strategic global hub for the company's sales, services and operations, employing over 2,300 people in Limerick and Dublin.
Limerick
Manufacturing operations in Raheen. The Limerick operation now employs over 1,000 people and is a strategic global hub and centre of excellence for operations, services and a range of support functions such as HR, legal affairs, IT and finance.
The Limerick operation currently consists of the following elements:
Global supply chain
Customer Briefing Centre
Global Solutions Innovation Centre
Global Services Command Centre
Global IT services
Business operations
Global finance
Dublin
Sales and customer service in Cherrywood, south Co Dublin.
Dell Cherrywood is one of the largest customer centres of its kind in Ireland. It is home to 1,200 employees who are involved in multi-lingual technical sales and services at a business centre of excellence.
The operation, which employs people from 60 different nationalities, is engaged in the following areas:
EMEA commercial sales
Global services support
Marketing, finance and support
Teams
Cloud Engineering Centre
Source: Dell website
