Dell Storage vice-president and general manager, Alan Atkinson
Partner profitability is a major focus for Dell and the company is continuing its ongoing focus in the channel, according to its A/NZ channels and alliances general manager, Geoff Wright.
“We’re trying to grow in this channel and work with a selected group of very influential partners. To do that, we’ve got to provide them with the ability to grow profitably,” he said.
In line with partner growth, the company has launched a new rebate program as part of its Partner Direct channel program. He said a key element to that is around enterprise products with rebates attached to them for profitability.
One of the key tenants of it is a new business that brings in new customers to the Dell portfolio.
“They can be new customers or new lines of business within customers. That’s an important part to build on the offering we have. As an end-to-end technology vendor, we are looking to accelerate the end-to-end nature within our partners as well,” he said.
A business incentive it will be offering partners is up to 10 per cent on those deals.
“That is a great opportunity when it comes to double figures for rebates. It is also stackable – so it’s on top of the normal rebates and on top of accelerators. Partner profitability is the cornerstone of our efforts in the channel this year.”
Dell Storage vice-president and general manager, Alan Atkinson, told ARN the channel needs to have an end-to-end differentiated solution to profit in this market.
“The datacentre is changing at a rapid pace – in terms of performance, number of workloads, on a server, cost profile and density. Going forward, the channel needs to have a conversation with end users about this evolution and be there as a trusted advisor and implementer for them.”
He mentioned that there are three big drivers of storage in the market. The first, he said, is Cloud. This is followed by the growth of flash to become a ubiquitous solution for anything other than capacity storage.
“We are seeing tremendous movement towards solid-state and I think this is the year that it comes ahead at an inflection point. The cost of flash has decreased by 45 times over the past few years and there’s no other technology where it’s happening at that rate,” he said.
“This means that it’s not going to be a good year for disk storage.”
He also said the move towards software-defined is a driver for growth.
“We’re seeing a lot of workloads causing businesses to rethink their storage strategies. It is also hitting an inflection point where we’re seeing almost exponential adoption and growth, especially within the hyperconverged space,” he mentioned.
Atkinson said these areas will be key focuses for the company going forward, in addition to figuring out integrations between the company and its most recent acquisition, EMC.
“We’re moving from a world where latency is becoming a problem and that requires businesses to move closer to compute. Going forward, it’s hard to separate storage from compute and with new workloads and Cloud, it’s an area where we want to win.
“It’s a very exciting time for both companies, but it will take a couple of cycles as we work through the integration and how that gets implemented and what the acquisition brings to the table,” he added.
Dell will also be working closely with its distributors – Avnet, Hills, Dicker Data, and Ingram Micro, to build a broader reseller model in the coming months.
“Each of our distributors have a different selection of products and we’ve been doing a review of which lines go through which of the distributors. So, we’re working with them to drive Dell technology into their partner base and beyond as one of their enterprise solutions offerings,” Wright said.
