As the new year begins, Dell, the global IT giant, and Infobird, China's leading "cloud management" system vendor, have entered into an official strategic partnership.

The partnership, seen as a pioneering agreement between a renowned global IT company and a Chinese company, will set-out to explore the huge potential of the cloud computing technology market.

At the core of this partnership, the two companies will jointly provide cloud-computing-based enterprise-level Internet communication platform services to companies.

It will leverage Dell's extensive small-and-medium enterprise (SME) customer base by providing them with a cloud-computing service platform from Infobird that will in-turn enhance their client's effective business communication and customer management. As one of the pioneering partnerships in the IT industry on tapping into the broader applications of cloud computing, the cooperation accentuates an important step forward in China's IT business.

Under the partnership, Infobird would provide Qitongbao, a cloud management platform with a contact center as its core, to Dell's existing enterprise clients through Dell's powerful direct sales channels. Dell will thus be able to present a new value proposition to its clients via Infobird's platform. This is a strategic move by Dell towards becoming a service provider.

At the time of ever-increasing competition in the PC market, Dell has embarked on the path of transforming itself into a service enterprise. Management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has helped Dell to plan a long-term strategy. BCG concluded that Dell should achieve new growth in three directions in next 10 to 20 years: Cloud Computing, wireless and channels. The first move by Dell towards this direction was a strategic partnership in early October in 2009 with Salesforce, a global customer and sales management service provider that relies heavily on cloud computer technology.

To keep this momentum, Dell has now signed the deal with InfoBird, the China-based "cloud management" system provider. Infobird has successfully launched Qitongbao, a market-tested application of cloud computing used for contact center operations. The many new innovative functions of Qitongbao, such as call center operations, customer management and sales management, can help companies avoid missing any single sales opportunity, improve conversion rate of potential customers, monitor the quality of service in real-time, and manage advertisement effectiveness. Overall, this has unleashed the full potential of cloud computing.

Moses Wu Yi -min, President of Infobird, pointed out that Qitongbao is the starting point of the Infobird-Dell Partnership; Infobird is developing many new cloud computing tools to help enterprises to better manage their clients. With the newly formed partnership, the revenue of Infobird is expected to increase 50% plus, compared with no such partnership. In the near future, hundreds of thousands of enterprises will enter an effective customer management era benefiting from cloud computing technologies.

As Cloud Computing is one of Dell's three strategic moves for the next decade or so, Dell set very strict criteria in selecting its partners. During the process of seeking partners in the development of cloud computing, Dell found that many of the Chinese enterprises promoted themselves as cloud computing firms still at the concept or frameworks stage, while Infobird has secured thousands of clients in many industries through Qitongbao, an effective cloud computing-based customer management platform that has helped enterprises to reduce operation costs and improve efficiency.

Excited about the prospect of the cooperation with Infobird, Steve Felice , the global president of Dell's SMB business came to China to discuss the opportunities in cloud computing with Infobird. Soon after that, the two companies decided to form an official partnership.

Edward Chen Yong , Infobird's Vice President of Strategy, said that many of Dell's millions of small business customers have the experience of direct sales through Dell's contact center and are aware of the functions and benefits of a contact center. In the meantime, for companies that are working with Dell's business model, they typically have a strong inclination of IT applications and a relatively flexible budget. This makes Dell an ideal partner for Infobird to promote its Qitongbao to SMEs. According to Moses Wu , at the initial trial stage of Infobird-Dell cooperation, Dell's sales people used telesales to promote Qitongbao to several thousand of Dell's existing customers; most of them showed great interest in the product and a significant number of them even bought the software within that month. This satisfying result has inspired both Infobird and Dell to explore opportunities further through their partnership.

40 Billion RMB Market to be Tapped Into
The cooperation between Infobird and Dell aims at a growing an enterprise market worth 40 billion RMB. Dell has been enjoying an advantage over its competitors in hardware companies especially in its close relationships and direct business transactions with its SME companies. With the software application from Infobird, Dell can provide comprehensive solutions to its SME clients. For Infobird, Dell's capability to penetrate the SMB market will help Infobird's rapid distribution in the SME market; and both sides will bond together to benefit from the growing enterprise IT solution market including B2B, B2C and services.

Indeed this prospect is based on solid projections. According to a report from Analysys International, a leading Chinese research firm, China has more than 42 million small and medium enterprises, less than 10% of which are leveraging e-commerce. While at the same time, the number of China's Internet users has reached 380 million, including 87.88 million online shoppers; and buying through Internet is still growing fast with at an annual rate of 38.9%. Therefore, convenient and efficient online shopping will become the option of more people. With the increase in enterprises in adopting e-commerce, as well as the explosion in the online shopping population, more and more SMEs will adopt this business model of "the network channel + enterprise-class Internet communications platform" to reduce costs and to improve efficiency. All this would create a huge market for enterprise level internet communications platforms, expecting to reach 40 billion RMB.