Dell Managed Services: One Step Forward, One Step Back
Dell Inc.’s PartnerDirect channel partner program showed some momentum in the company’s most recent quarter. But Channel Chief Greg Davis (pictured) concedes Dell Managed Services is only seeing “small momentum” with managed services partners. Here’s the update from Davis, who spoke with MSPmentor about Dell’s channel performance earlier today.
Dell’s managed services story is starting to sound familiar: Dell shifted its managed services strategy from on-premises appliances to a fully Dell-hosted model. At the same time Dell has be selling managed services directly to end-customers, though partners can continue to leverage Dell’s hosted managed services platforms as well.
The bottom line: Many of the on-premises channel partners ultimately pursued alternative vendor relationships even as Dell signed up new partners for the hosted managed services offering, Davis says.
“We’re seeing small momentum,” Davis admitted. “We’ve had some partners who pulled away because they are running their own hosted solution. We’re adding enough new partners to offset [those that have left]. We fundamentally believe we can offer a valuable solution with one hosted platform for our partners, rather than have partners hosting their own systems.” Though strategically, Davis says he realizes there are those MSPs that want to run their own systems.
Davis made similar statements to MSPmentor in November 2009. Overall, Dell has been pretty quiet in the managed services partner ecosystem, though Dell did attend the recent Autotask Community Live conference in April 2010.
Meanwhile, Dell’s overall channel business seems to be growing rapidly, thanks to certified partners driving Dell server and storage sales.
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Dell’s channel commitment via MSPs is thin at best. With their acquisition of Perot and focus, for the most part, on government and enterprise accounts, I can’t see how they’ll rationalize keeping SME channel program members happy. With a penchant for going direct and leaving the partner with crumbs of Dell’s choosing, I can definitely understand what “small momentum” is all about.
Consider the Perot $3.9 billion dollar laundry bill. That’s a whole lotta of additional SME “Silverback” contracts to sell to float the massive enterprise Dell boat. I’m just having a hard time believing that these huge companies can structure a sustainable and profitable MSP offering when their overhead is sooooooooooo big. Indeed, one forward and two steps back and reeling…
Scott: I understand your skepticism when it comes to Dell Managed Services working with MSPs. But I give Dell Channel Chief Greg Davis credit: He’s on the phone with reporters after every quarterly report, sharing deeper details about Dell’s PartnerDirect program. And he didn’t dodge questions about the managed services strategy.
Generally speaking, I think Dell is most interested in server and storage VARs. Building a big managed services partner ecosystem doesn’t seem to be a big priority for Dell, at least in my opinion.
-jp
In May we demoed 2 of Dell’s solutions: SilverBack aka Dell ProManage RIM and EverDream aka Dell Distributed Device Management.
Our impressions:
*ProManage was extremely clunky and counterintuitive. Required completion of expensive and time consuming Dell Certification Program.
*DDM 3rd party patches were laughably out of date and we stopped demoing the moment they told us the bundled VNC was not Vista or Windows 7 compatible. It’s been 3 and a half years and you still haven’t included Vista support? HUH?!
A Dell branded (or co-branded) solution would have been an extremely easy sell for us. We even had customers lined up.