How Murale is Leading his Team into a Brighter Future

Murale Narayanan | Senior Director | Global Technical Delivery (Infra, Cloud & Application) | India

Originally Published: May 11, 2022

Murale Narayanan is a Senior Director at Dell Technologies, with over 20 years of experience in successfully setting up and managing IT Cloud operations and implementing digital IT transformative strategies for large corporations. We asked him a few questions to understand what he does at Dell Technologies and how his team is helping him transform the business.

Q: How would you describe your current role at Dell Technologies? How are you enabling business transformation for your organization?

A: In this role, I am responsible for leading the Dell Technologies Managed Services (DTMS) India Technical Delivery, which consists of the Modern Infrastructure, Cloud, and Application services group. This large team focuses on managing mission-critical cloud infrastructure for Dell’s global customers across key portfolios of Dell products and VMware solutions. Another key responsibility of mine is to inspire, influence, and guide my team to deliver the best value to our customers in line with our guiding principles. Together as a team, we are working tirelessly to change the way we operate today so we can keep up with the pace of this fast-changing industry!

Q: What are some challenges you've faced, and what is your strategy to overcome them?

A: The biggest challenge that all of us are facing right now, post COVID-19, is the high industry demand for niche skills, making it difficult to both retain top talent and hire new talent to tend to our ever-increasing businesses. We’re working on some upskilling and cross-skilling initiatives to empower a wider resource pool with the niche skills that we require. It’s an exciting time to join Dell Technologies!

Another challenge specific to our team is bringing in a change to the mindset of people to transform from storage, backup, and converged technical professionals to SREs. We take this task forward by setting an example and motivating my team to do the same, to bring in the culture of blame-free postmortem and automating solutions where possible, whenever a problem is recurring.

Q: How is your team helping you in this journey?

A: I have a talented pool of management resources who have both the capability and craving to transform the business with me. They support me with a series of proactive initiatives. The DTMS team in India is working on some exciting projects to aid us in this journey

• Workforce Transformation – Cross-skill/up-skilling towards multi-skilling
• Shift Left – Move repetitive tasks to the bottom of the resource pyramid and create room for value-added activity on top
• Next-Gen Talent Pool – To provide an opportunity to move out of silos and become full-stack engineers
• Engineering Connect & Innovation – Self-explanatory!

Q: We all know that Dell Technologies has an unmatched work culture. But can you tell us a little bit about your team culture?

A: Adding to what you mentioned, yes - Dell’s work culture is one of the best and we pride ourselves on that. It’s not just something we talk about, it truly permeates through the entire company. On the DTMS India team, for instance, we engage with our employees through various channels like Leaders Connect, CSR activities, Fun Fridays, technology brown bag sessions, virtual visits, celebrations and so much more. We also encourage team members to participate in Employee Resource Groups (ERG) to network with like-minded people and be a part of projects that interest them and add value to their lives. We have a flat hierarchy and often go out of our way to provide a great experience for our new hires and seasoned team members alike because it’s the team that makes us.

Q: As a team, what is your vision for the future?

A: My team’s vision is to move from siloed technical operators to full-stack Engineers/ SRE who provide value-added services to our customers and not just meet the SLA. Our goal is to establish ourselves as trusted go-to partners for all our customers. We have carefully devised our strategy to achieve that vision by modernizing our service portfolio with niche skills and future-ready talent to ensure a seamless transition from legacy to microservices-based cloud architectures. We are on our way to becoming a team of proactive, problem-solving go-getters that deliver world-class service to our customers, and at the same time enjoy the pride and satisfaction of being part of something great.

Want to be part of our amazing team? Apply on our careers site.