To say 2016 was a big year for Dell EMC Canada president Kevin Peesker would be an understatement.
The executive represented Canadian interests in what was one of the largest mergers in the tech industry’s history. The announcement that Dell and EMC were combining their firepower in a $67 billion mega deal was made at the end of 2015 but wasn’t actually completed until September 2016. While many tech experts thought the merger would be disruptive to the market, Peesker said it was a “seamless transition” for the two companies.
“I found that [the merger] was an incredibly positive experience and we’ve really hit the ground running,” he told CDN. “It brought together two great organizations and I was fortunate enough to travel across the country several times to meet and work with our new team members, as well as our legacy Dell folks.”
Dell EMC Canada also hired a new Canadian channel chief, Deanna Thomson, in December 2016 after an exhaustive search and more than 25 initial applicants for the role. Thomson, a 20-year Dell Technologies veteran, spent much of her career “in the end user space working with large corporations, and in the last few years, in the channel community building a great ecosystem for Dell in Western Canada,” Peesker said.
“Promoting Deanna has been a fantastic move for us, and we’ve had great feedback from the partner community, who engages with Deanna most often,” he continued. “We brought together the Dell and EMC channel teams under one program and it’s been fantastic to have Deanna’s knowledge of the organization and connections with the partner community. She’s a class act who represents us with integrity.”
Dell EMC Canada was also named partner vendor of the year for the third year in a row by Softchoice, one of Canada’s most respected partner organizations and the No. 2 CDN Solution Provider in 2016.
Along with this recognition, Dell EMC had a “phenomenal year,” making significant investments in the Canadian partner community, both in program development and software enhancements.
“Over the last year, we saw incredible support from the partner community for Dell and then Dell EMC,” Peesker explained. “We saw the partner community step up and deliver high double digit growth across Canada, which is fantastic, and that has resulted in us really being able to outgrow the market and see success in our mission to make technology accessible for our customers.”
Looking forward in 2017, Peesker told CDN that Dell EMC Canada will be investing in “significant learning and development internally” and “expanding that knowledge to [the company’s] partner community.”
“Dell EMC is number one in so many core technology categories in the Canadian landscape, and we will use 2017 to leverage this platform. Another immediate objective is to ensure our partner community is well aware of how they can take advantage of this collaboration and utilize it to become even more profitable,” Peesker said.
