Dell and InMobi are coming together to get a pie in the Indian e-Commerce sector

Now Computer maker Dell and ad-tech firm InMobi are aiming to grab a bite of the expanding e-Commerce sector in India. They have forged a strategic alliance to leverage each other's capabilities and build a next-generation e-Commerce platform for InMobi's customers.

According to the agreement, Dell will give InMobi access to its R&D labs to build next-gen products. The computer maker, which has earlier worked with Bengaluru-based InMobi, will also offer some of its hand-picked products to InMobi for beta testing and customization.

In turn, InMobi will help Dell draw insights into the needs of its largest customers on servers, networking and storage for high computing needs and big data requirements.

The partnership comes a week after Dell's CEO Michael Dell met InMobi founder Naveen Tewari to discuss ways in which the two companies could help each other to build technology capabilities. Dell was on a two-day visit to India.

"We've enjoyed a very strong relationship with InMobi for a few years now — we, as a company, are very aligned to early engagements with startups and entrepreneurial initiatives and how we can add value to some of these new businesses that have come up," said Alok Ohrie, president and managing director of Dell India.

He said: "So far this relationship has been beneficial to both the parties. If you look at InMobi, they are in a space which is highly innovative and highly disruptive, and clearly their requirements and needs are unique to that extent...and that opens us huge amount opportunities to engage in a strategic way.”

The alliance with InMobi comes at a time when Dell, which went private about two years back, is looking to engage with emerging early-stage startups and companies and tap into disruptive solutions, amid a large scale shift across the personal computing landscape.

"We believe that this will help us build some of the more innovative and disruptive solutions that will be relevant in the ecommerce space and the web-tech space," said Ohrie.

"As part of this alliance, we're committing a few things. Firstly, we're committing an exclusive access to our beta systems that they will get to use, get to deploy...which will allow them an early visibility of what's coming, and hopefully they'll be better prepared to take advantage of the platform as and when it will be ready for a formal launch. Secondly, they will have access to our labs through very clearly dedicated and defined sponsors," he said.

The alliance will also see Dell's products being specifically tailored for InMobi's mobile advertising platforms, said Ohrie.

"We've always been looking for a partner who can invest early and see the bigger picture on where it can head to, and I think Dell was very aggressive in that sense," said Mohit Saxena, co-founder and CTO of In-Mobi.

(Image: Indiatimes)