MANILA – Recognizing the significance of the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) market, Dell knows that the region, and the Philippines in particular, is not to be ignored. On a recent visit to Manila, Margaret Franco, regional marketing head of the Commercial Sales and Enterprise Solutions (CSES) business for Dell Asia Pacific and Japan shared some key insights with adobo.
“APJ is a very strong market that has very strong growth,” Franco notes. “ASEAN has one of the higher GDP growths. In the Philippines, it’s 6.9% growth which is very strong. We see strong growth in many of the other markets in Asia as well.”
Dell has targeted enterprise solutions and future-ready enterprise as a critical part of the company’s IT solutions strategy, and Franco reiterates this when she says, “Enterprise really means business – large businesses, businesses for anyone. The Future-Ready Enterprise is a concept about ensuring that IT departments can continue to be relevant for their businesses. CSO staffs rethink about their business models, and think of how to create the flexibility that’s needed for companies to grow in the environment we’re living in now.
Having been with Dell since 2005 and with over 20 years of experience in the IT industry, Franco has seen tremendous growth in the business over that period of time. That has allowed her to take a step back and look at the growth of the industry when she shares, “Dell has been around for 30 years and the IT industry has completely changed. There’s been the PC era, Internet era, virtualization era, and now, the digital era. So thinking about when I just joined Dell, we were just on the cusp of the virtualization era where virtualization was really starting to take hold within the datacenters. Customers were only doing mere prototyping at the start. So in my career, I think the most significant is the virtualization era, the time when virtualization was becoming prevalent and that was really setting the stage for what we now have which is the digital era. If you think about it, that was a tremendous amount of change in just 10 years.”
In her current role, Franco leads the commercial marketing organization responsible for Dell’s brand and demand generation for the company’s end-to-end product portfolio across the region. She is part of the regional executive leadership team (ELT) reporting directly to Amit Midha, president of Dell in Asia Pacific and Japan and is responsible for driving Dell’s brand as the preferred technology provider in Asia Pacific and Japan.
“Asia is further ahead in terms of adopting digital transformation compared to other parts of the world,” Franco points out. “Gartner did a study on adoption of digital transformation across the world, and many Asian regions like India, China, and ASEAN are several points ahead leading the rest of the world.”
She stresses that point further when she says, “The APJ market, if you compare it to Europe and the US, is far more progressive and faster to adopt than other countries in other regions. There are lots of reasons for that, such as skipping entire landlines, going to mobile, a culture that’s much more open to new things and flexible. As I think about just the technology industry and how much change it has gone through, what I find in the Asia region is that we should embrace all these characteristics of the market. Embrace it in Dell marketing and in Dell product positioning.”
