The return of Kevin Peesker to the Canadian channel was a major story in 2013. Dell Canada was at a point in time where they were virtually rudderless. Just the appointment alone would have made Peesker a Top 25 Newsmaker.
The reason why Peesker is so high on this list was what he did with his new found job.
Peesker knew he had to made significant changes within his own ranks as well as the subsidiary’s position in the marketplace.
Kevin Peesker
He chose to re-organize and introduce a Canada-first approach to Dell Canada. This strategy, while bold is fraught with risk. Going to an all Canadian-strategy flies in the face of what other high tech vendors are doing in this country.
“For us the real benefit is with scale and the ability to leverage the resources we have across the country. We want to go end-to-end in a couple of dimensions and from a channel standpoint with partners and we have the opportunity to have a consultative program. The leadership here has the ability to engaged national organizations and regional one with the same capacity and excellence,” Peesker said.
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American-based vendors who set up shop north of the border tend to adopt a North American regional strategy that treats Canada as one area of a much larger market. In most cases this strategy succeeds although when it fails, those failures are of epic proportions.
Peesker came back to Canada after running Dell’s European consumer and small business unit. He told CDN that the Canada-first strategy was his top priority because he believed it could cut through the complexity in the marketplace that customers have had to deal with.
Dell Canada was placed into four business units and, according to Peesker, the benefits for the customer is they have one single organization to deal with now.
“And, the customer has one back to pat. This will also help us facilitate more solutions from an end-to-end perspective for the customer,” he added.
The other big news for Dell in 2013 was its successful attempt to take the company private.
Peesker said Dell going private made 2013 a very exciting time.
“We are the world’s largest start-up and the one thing about Dell people is that they are consistently entrepreneurial. That will never change. The entrepreneurial spirit started from Michael Dell in his college dorm room. We are very nimble internally and with customers. Going private we are now in a position where one individual owns 75 per cent of the organization. He is making the decisions. He has been clear on the long term investment in the enterprise, client products, the PC business, new product lines we recently invested in such as software for our end-to-end solution strategy,” he said.
2013 would end up being a memorable year for Dell in its channel journey.
Besides Peesker returning from Europe, the company brought on well-known channel guru Frank Vitagliano to run North American channels.
The year ended with Greg Davis, Dell’s first ever channel chief and the 2007 CDN Newsmaker of the Year as head of Dell Canada leave his post after a six year reign. Davis is now the vice president of software and peripherals at Dell.
The new face of Dell’s channel is a women, Cheryl Cook. She was formerly Dell’s vice-president of enterprise solutions, and had responsibility for the channel at Sun.