By Emeka Aginam

To further reposition its brand in the the Nigerian market, the founder and chief executive officer of Dell, Michael Dell recently visited Nigeria where he exchanged ideas with partners and unfolded agenda for the market.

With this development, Dell was intending to reciprocate the commitment of the partner community by shouldering some of the burden of the Proof of Concepts though direct input or discount structure to maximize the reach and impact.

Other initiatives considered include a local Dell Lab to showcase her range of solutions in a ‘touch and feel’ manner to offer customers the opportunity of experiencing the solutions in a live environment, the provision of Engineer certification facilities in-Country so that partners do not have to incur huge travel expenses and visa inconveniences to go overseas for certification, while at the same time giving more partner engineers the opportunity of the required skills acquisition.

The setting up a credible service center to give the customers assurances of after sales support, the consideration of an industry standard Data Center in Nigeria for co-location, and also to push Dell’s cloud offering were also among initiatives by Dell.
Meanwhile, Dell’s selected partners who were invited for a closed door meeting during the visit included Austin Okere, Founder and CEO of the Computer Warehouse Group, Mr. Andy Nwani, Founder and CEO of Dataflex, Mr. Gbolahan Olayomi, CEO of Equipment Hall and Mr. Emeka Maduibuike, Managing Director of Systemtech Group.

This historic visit was in fulfillment of a promise made by Michael in September 2010 when Computer Warehouse Group visited the Dell Executive Briefing Center (EBC) in Texas with some customers from Nigeria, including Ecobank International.

The appointment of Nigerian, Nnamdi Orakwue as Executive Director, Strategy and Operations by Dell, it was learnt may have in no small measure contributed to actualizing the trip.

After a welcome address by Mr. Chuks Ulu-Udensi, Country Manager, West Africa, Michael gave an insightful presentation about the current strategic focus of Dell, and the acquisitions that have been made to support the strategy, including acquisitions such as Equalogic, Compellent, Wyse and Perot Systems, which are the technology platforms upon which Dell intends to launch into the Enterprise and Cloud spaces.

Similarly, Mr. Austin Okere explained that CWG has taken advantage of the opportunities of these platforms to provide virtualization solutions to major customers in Finance and Oil & Gas sectors .