Enterprise systems is a strategic product area for Dell,” heralded Kevin Rollins, chief executive officer of Dell when he visited India early this year. As Dell sees growth in its server and storage shipments, it is putting development resources behind this direction. Its new stop: Bangalore.

At the helm of this India R&D Center is Dr. Vivek Mansingh, the Country Manager behind Dell’s India steering wheel. The enthusiasm in which he speaks reflects the complex work that happens at this center. He walks us through the sophisticated labs explaining with vivid enthusiasm (mixed with a sense of reverence) on how his engineers are working on Dell’s next-generation enterprise products. The Bangalore team is looking into improving Dell’s hardware portfolio—design enterprise servers and storage products. The aim is to come out with an end-to-end hardware server design from India.

Sometime last year, Edward Yardumian flew down to Bangalore and asked the engineers at the Dell India R&D Center, “How many of you are ready to design a two-socket server?” It was a rhetorical question. But to Yardumian’s surprise “all hands went up.” What the Regional Director of Platform Engineering could see in the engineers is the hunger to learn and excitement to work on a challenging task. Since then the Center has added significant complexity to its activities.

Designing an end-to-end hardware system requires the engineers to have knowledge of an entire system. Often engineers are content with the specific subsystem knowledge they possess. “The key challenge for us was to get the engineers in India to focus on the entire system,” says Kefetew Selassie, Director of Enterprise Engineering and the co-site Leader of India center. “Though they have a strong technical background, we are working towards further improving their understanding of the interdependency between components in an enterprise system.”

The Experts
For Dell it was easy to fill the missing gap. It brought a lot of senior talent from its other design centers to coach and mentor the teams. Currently there are eight expats and around 20 returnees from the U.S. who have several years of experience. Along with their deep technical competency and business mindset, what they brought with them was the Dell Methodology of global development and Dell’s best practices.