LAS VEGAS – The Dell EMC Partner Program is getting an upgrade.
Building on its year-over-year double-digit revenue growth, the channel program includes new offerings and incentives for partners who, according to Joyce Mullen, president of Global Channel, OEM and IoT solutions for Dell EMC, have seen “tremendous growth” and continue to grow their business.
But it can be even better, she said.
“We know there is still massive opportunity in front of us,” she said. “Our top priority is helping partners solve their customers’ complex digital challenges.”
Announced at the Global Partner Summit, the new Dell EMC Ready Stack is exclusive to channel partners and will make it easier for partners to bundle, sell and build converged infrastructure stack solutions based on current and future Dell EMC data centre technologies.
It’s an offering Deanna Thomson says will give partners a huge boost of confidence in their data centre strategy.
“I’ve never seen us do such a large stack offering like this before,” she told reporters.
The solutions included in the stack program include Dell EMC storage – such as Unity, XtremIO, SC Series and Isilon – Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, Dell EMC Data Protection and Dell EMC open networking.
Additionally, a newly launched proof of concept program – specifically for their storage solutions – will give partners the ability to get new applications into the hands of their customers a lot faster, without having to worry about hardware or software costs.
“They’ll have the ability to do a partner-led proof of concept where we actually do a trial for the end user customer so they can test their applications and workloads,” said Thomson. “Dell has struggled in this space … but now we have a fantastic program. We’ve never had anything quite this robust before.”
Dell EMC will also introduce new IoT Solution Competency offerings later this week.
“When it comes out, we’re going to really be focusing on trying to find partners across the country that really want to embrace that part of the business,” said Thomson.
Canada channel stood out during mega merger, execs say
While there are still some loose ends when it comes to the mega merger between Dell Technologies and EMC, the Canadian channel has been a bright spot during the transition.
“The messaging down to the channel and customers in Canada has been seamless,” Ravi Pendekanti, senior VP of server solutions product management and marketing at Dell EMC told CDN. “We didn’t have to worry about integration or communication. Canada has not been an issue for us.”
Canada also remains in the top 10 when it comes to generating revenue for Dell EMC through its server and storage portfolio, and is showing a lot of demand for single and dual socket servers and modular architectures, said Pendekanti. He’s also noticed partners and customers showing a lot of interest in deep learning technology, and cautioned them to make sure their data sets are complete and accurate prior to taking the deep dive into that space.
“You have to train your modules. But if you can’t do that because you don’t have the right data coming in, you’re training engine fails,” he said. “That’s a challenge across the board.”
Howard Elias, president of Dell Services, Digital and IT, echoed some of Pendekanti’s thoughts while speaking to how the channel and other distributors reacted to the $67 billion merger.
“I believe Canada is one of our better performing markets,” he told CDN, adding he thinks the transition still continues today. “It’s a multi-year journey. We’re helping to guide our channel partners and ecosystem partners to work with us in delivering this value to customers. But the results speak, because all of our routes to market, whether it’s direct channel partners or service provider partners, cloud partners … all of them are growing.”
