As a leading global technology company – Dell Technologies has always kept its partner community on top its business agenda and with the introduction of Dell EMC PowerStore – the company is opening up great opportunities for its partners.
Dell’s recently launched PowerStore midrange all-flash array can deliver unique rewards for partners by enabling richer margins, compelling rebates incentives as well as providing unique abilities to deliver services.
Anil Sethi, Vice President & GM, Channels India, Dell Technologies speaks with Zia Askari from ChannelDrive.in about the company’s latest launch and its strategy moving ahead.
How is the storage market evolving in India and what are the new opportunities it holds for channel partners operating in this space?
The Indian external storage market presents a sea of opportunities. As per the recent IDC report, India witnessed a growth of 6% YOY by vendor revenue and stood at USD 91 million in Q4 2019. Since the conversations around the digital & IT transformation by businesses are evolving with time, especially due to the influx of emerging technologies, we are positive that the enterprise storage market is bound to grow even further in the future.
All of this together represents a huge opportunity for the channel partners. As more and more businesses take a step towards transforming themselves into a data-first business, channel partners will become the front ending force behind this change. Hence, they can expect to generate greater sales avenues and richer margins.
What kind of innovations is Dell Technologies offering in the midrange storage space?
Dell Technologies has been consistently bringing innovations into its various technology portfolios with the ultimate goal of enabling our customers with the best technology, helping them to deliver high performance and better business outcomes. We have one of the strongest and most robust mid-range storage portfolios in the industry and our leadership in the external storage industry is the testimony of it. As per IDC, Dell Technologies has been ranked as No.1 in the Indian external storage industry for the last 10 quarters.
Our comprehensive mid-range portfolio, which includes an array of powerful products such as PowerMax, UnityXT, VxFlex, etc. among others, have been developed using state-of-the-art technologies to help maximize efficiency at a minimal cost for our customers. Our recent product Dell EMC PoweStore has also been built from ground up using best-in-class technology and experience across our infrastructure business. For example, the performance optimized design, one of the features of this product, will help the businesses deliver 7x more IOPS and 3x lower latency as compared to other products in the market. Moreover, this design will also allow adding capacity or processing power i.e. scaling up and scaling out, independently.
How will Dell EMC PowerStore help channel partners to capitalize on their business opportunities and to earn the customer trust?
Our partners, as always were at the top of our mind while developing the new PowerStore midrange all-flash array. Through this product, partners can reap the rewards by earning richer margins, compelling rebates incentives as well as the ability to deliver services on top.
Moreover, we are confident that this first mid-range storage product by us as a combined entity, will bring in lot of opportunities for our partners because of the benefits it offers. For example, it is designed to deliver efficiency to customers that have performance growth orientated workloads, especially those with large database applications, as well as organisations with satellite operations e.g. retail, banking and medical.
Furthermore, a few additional benefits delivered by PowerStore are:
- Maximizes their flash resource by taking advantage of this future-ready technology that supports end-to-end NVMe flash storage and SCM
- Enhances their shared storage support for virtualized and bare-metal server environments through hosting of applications on storage with AppsON
By leveraging these touchpoints, we are positive that PowerStore will bring our partners better sales opportunities and build their business continuity.
What is so special about Dell EMC CloudIQ storage monitoring and analytics software that combines machine learning and human intelligence for real-time performance and capacity analysis?
Data is growing exponentially each year, however, the budgets and staffing are not growing at an equivalent rate. This has created the need for tools that can continue the data transition to more autonomous infrastructure in no time. This is where CloudIQ comes into the picture. Dell EMC CloudIQ, is a platform that provides actionable insights on infrastructure health anywhere, anytime. By deploying CloudIQ, the users will be able to:
- Reduce Risk as the platform makes daily storage administration tasks easier by helping you identify potential issues before they impact your environment
- Improve productivity of staff and infrastructure with a single pane of glass view and immediate time-to-value
- Plan ahead for business needs and avoid outages with capacity full projections and anomaly detection
In fact, Dell EMC PowerStore is also equipped with the power of CloudIQ. This combination will give administrators all the intel they need to take quick action and more efficiently manage their storage environment.
Why is Dell EMC CloudIQ storage monitoring and analytics software important for channel partners today?
As I mentioned earlier, Dell EMC’s CloudIQ is a solution ahead of its time. By combining ML, advanced analytics and human intelligence, this cloud-based app reduces risk, spots anomalies before trouble occurs, and even helps IT generalists plan for future storage needs with powerful forecasting. We believe that by educating the customers about the benefits of this solution, channel partners can help customers make informed decisions about investing in the right type of IT infrastructure, thereby broadening the scope of sales opportunities for themselves.
How is Dell Technologies supporting its partner community amid the Covid-19 pandemic?
Our channel partners are an integral part of our business and now more than ever, the current situation demands us to collaborate and address the challenges together. In fact, both the customers and partners are looking up to technology players like us, to enable business continuity response processes to mitigate fluid situations.
We understand that financing and cash flow liquidity plays an important role in any business continuity plan. Many of our partners may need help in this area, as they try to serve their customers and help their employees remain productive during this difficult time. Keeping that in mind, we have launched a Partner Relief Package to provide immediate financial relief to our metaled partners, while helping them build capabilities and pipeline for the future.
In addition to this, Dell Technologies Working Capital Solutions (WCS) Programme and Dell Financial Services (DFS) are working on ways to continue supporting partners and to help them support their customers. We are also introducing new team-based pricing options for solutions providers to make all training more affordable for our partners’ teams.
