Canalys Channels Forum APAC 2018 | ChannelDrive.in Interaction with Dell EMC – Part 1
One of the biggest advantages with Dell EMC comes in the form of its holistic portfolio of IT products and solutions. And when it comes to storage and server space, the company is bringing a lot of innovation and this is helping channel as well as enterprise customers realize the full potential in this space.
At the recently held Canalys Channels Forum in Hong Kong – Darren Sullivan, SVP Global Partner Strategy and Business Operations at Dell EMC and Tian Beng Ng, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Channels APJ, Dell EMC speak with Zia Askari from ChannelDrive.in about the company’s current channel strategy and its future plans.
Darren Sullivan
Today how do you define the Dell partner strategy that you have on a global level?
DS: We are engaging with our partners primarily to help us expand our reach as a company, to access new markets, to increase share of wallet with customers, to provide capabilities around solutions, helping solve customer problems. So all these things where partners can complement and extend our capabilities, that is what we are looking to engage partners with. In addition, we have a particular focus on storage right now and making sure we are doing everything we can to work with our partners to accelerate our growth in our storage portfolio.
So you said that you are focusing heavily on storage. What are some of the big trends you see happening in the storage segment today?
DS: Yes, so in storage we look at growth opportunities in data protection, flash, hyper-converged. There are a number of different high growth opportunities within the storage portfolio. We also want to make sure that we are effectively competing in all areas, high end, mid-tier and low end, so that we have a comprehensive portfolio that can solve customer problems in a number of different ways and have a compelling portfolio for our partners to sell to their own customers.
How do you ensure that your partners are continuously moving up the value chain and are ready for let’s say new way services, like this concept of provisioning of services which is gaining a lot of traction and importance. What is Dell’s strategy to ensure that?
DS: We are working through that exact topic right now, and so we have a program internally that we are referring to as the “Dell Technologies Advantage for Partners Effort”. What that is driving is, what is the future of the market and what do the channel and partners of the future look like and need to be doing?. And so that is characterised by a focus around solutions, consumption models, cloud. And so now we are working through an effort, trying to define for our partners how they can work across our Dell Technologies companies, because that’s where transformational solutions are going to be driven through – a combination of Dell EMC, VMWare, Pivotal and other parts of our Dell Technologies portfolio.
And so, our Dell EMC Partner Program is focused on infrastructure, the Client and Infrastructure Solutions parts of our business. In each of the other strategically aligned businesses, they have their own partner programs and so what we are trying to figure out is how can we harness the power of the full Dell Technologies portfolio for partners to drive the digital transformation agenda: IT transformation, workforce transformation, security transformation. This entails is making sure we have the right solutions that partners can take to market, to make sure we can have the right engagement model across the different sales teams within our Dell Technologies family of companies.
What does our program need to look like? We are going to continue to have programs in each of our businesses, but how do we start to make it easier for partners to work across our programs? And then it gets into operational execution, how do we do deal registration across our businesses, so that when a partner has a transformational solution opportunity with a customer that we are able to help them drive that opportunity through a number of different elements, from the programmatic aspect all the way through operational execution.
In terms of geographies, because you are handling partner ecosystem from a global perspective, so which are the most profiting geographies for Dell EMC from the partner side?
DS: I don’t know if I have on the top of my head the profitability by markets. But we are looking to expand our business in all regions. There is opportunity in every one of our regions around the globe. There’s plenty of opportunity in markets that we don’t serve. And so, driving new business and making sure that we are driving high-margin opportunities through storage and data protection and attaching services with client and server opportunities. That’s where we are focused on – driving profitability.
Any take on the most important markets that you have globally for Dell?
DS: Well, I think it’s a balanced approach. We obviously have large markets that we serve, and there’s huge opportunity there, but we also want to bounce with high-growth opportunities, like the data point earlier today that Steve (Brazier) had shared that India is surpassing UK and France – and that says it all. There is opportunity in all markets and so what we are trying to do is make sure that we have a channel partner program that can manage across different market dynamics, from large developed markets all the way to small emerging. So, we are looking at how should our program be optimised in those different markets to motivate and attract partners to do business in those markets, because we want to make sure that we have a balanced approach across all regions.
