Dell’s journey to the Dell Venue Pro and beyond...

This article is purely my view-point and understanding of the business scenarios and various factors that brought the Dell Venue Pro out into the market.

Historically, Dell’s main strength has been its the 'Direct' business-model and supply chain execution speed, which, with time could be copied by competition and slowly by steadily, the gap between Dell and its competition really thinned and the days of God like profitability were short lived.

Dell is one company that always seemed to me that it never innovated much on the products front (in comparison to its peers) and the strategic moves that it made on its products; be it printers, mobile communication devices or even other accessories, it always wound those operations up after not reaching a successful fruition.

While this was how Dell was going through internally, on the outside, everyone was keenly witnessing another Big Hi-tech/Computer Giant, a Cupertino - California peer’s astronomical growth and even beating $10B/quarter or more consistently and their single point formula was innovation and aesthetics. In the competitive environment, another set of big peers merged and have surpassed Dell very much with time. This was the time that Dell seriously engrossed in thought and came up with a strategy to innovate again…

However, After Michael Dell came back at the helm of Dell, we’ve all seen that in recent times, Dell again has been making good progress in getting to the leader position for two consecutive quarters but then, lost to HP the last QTR of 2010 by 2.8%. Ouch! That was narrow. It was then, the fact that both Dell and HP-Compaq together amounted to lesser than 30% of the PC market share. There’s so much more to accomplish...

On the Geo-specific strategy, Dell has realized the importance of India (greater than a Billion USD in revenues) in the overall pie for revenues and growth. Moreover, anyone following Gartner’s reports can tell that ‘the growth rate in the Indian market was more than five times the average growth rate of the global PC market in the fourth quarter’. Dell’s growth rate in India was 55% (for Q3 – YoY), the highest recorded at Dell’s any GEO market. Impressive India right there!

From my readings, I have come to know of their deep focus on acquisitions as well as aiming for growth in the Mobile market and Cloud computing that will take Dell to the next level. There’s serious competition and only taking some bold steps will jump it into the next orbit. One such bold attempt is the DVP… our Dell Venue Pro.

Dell, I think, is trying to really do a ONE-UP on its competition here with the first mover advantage with a windows based smart phone!

I, for one, will keep a close watch on what Dell does on the newer models it plans to release (per the leaked Dell Products Road map recently)

For 2011:

• Another smart phone: Dell Wrigley (could be just the code name). Win 7 (1GHz proc, 4-inch WGVA screen, an 8 MP camera & 720p video) 
• Dell Gallo, based on Google's tablet-specific Android 2.3 OS (aka Honeycomb) 
• Dell Sterling, Honeycomb-based tablet 

For 2012:

• Dell Opus One & Dell Silver Oak (both of them, Android Tablets)
• Dell Rosemont & Dell Peju, Win 8 (windows based tablets) 

Here’s wishing Dell all the luck to once again, pace up to the yester-decade’s glory!!!