Dell Partners Getting More Rewards, Deal Protection

Michael Dell joined Dell channel head Denise Millard (pictured) on stage, describing partners as “a strength of our company.”

However, he warned that it was time for partners to take it up a gear around AI.

“Customers value your expertise, and we’re super grateful for all we’ve been able to do together. But this is a time where you we’ve all got to step it up and build these new capabilities. If you’re doing the same thing you were doing a couple years ago, that’s probably not going to work out.”

“The wait to see what won’t work,” agreed Millard. “The pace and scale is happening much too quickly for that to happen.”

Dell announced PowerStore Prime, an all-inclusive storage platform that Dell said brings the latest capabilities in terms of performance, efficiency, resiliency and multicloud. Millard contended that it sits in the sweet spot of a $13 billion addressable market.

“It’s a channel product,” said Dell’s EMEA channel lead, Alexandre Brousse. “It’s a product that we designed for the channel. We have compensation for [internal Dell] sellers if they sell it through the channel. As a Dell seller you get more money if you sell PowerStore through partners than if you sell it direct."

Brousse said Dell was seeing a massive increase in demand for flexible platforms that support multiple hypervisors.

“A lot of customers want to go multi-hypervisor because they don’t want lock-in,” he said.

Dell's Alexander Brousse

He pointed to Dell PowerFlex, which works across hypervisors from VMware, Microsoft and Red Hat. Dell also announced a partnership with Nutanix this week.

“All the hypervisors in the market are supported. So any customer today, we can have a discussion, we can work together. That’s a big one. It’s not just about multicloud; its multi cloud, its multi-hypervisor, multi-container, and it creates a lot of opportunity for partners.”

Brousse also maintained that Dell partner opportunities aren’t limited to infrastructure.

“We have a huge PC business together. And we don’t want to stop this PC business,” he said. “We want to accelerate this PC business.”

The exec said Dell partners can benefit from PC refresh opportunities around the end of Windows 10 support in 18 months, and with the launch of new AI PCs.

This week Millard told partners that Dell’s partner-first strategy for storage is paying off.

“We’re asking ourselves not to fulfil deals through the channel,” said Brousse. “We’re asking ourselves to work on a deal at the beginning of sales cycle with a partner. It’s not optics; it’s really it’s really a game changer for us.”

Brousse said Dell is already deploying some elements of partner-first across the rest of the business. These include immediately identifying a partner when a sales opportunity is detected, and paying more rebates and incentives to Dell partners on new customers.

With storage, Dell had quadrupled the number of partner of record-eligible resale accounts. If a partner holds storage POR status, Dell sales reps will work with them on any storage opportunity they uncover within that account. The vendor has now expanded partner of record status to servers.

“When a partner brings in a new customer, we flag the customer ‘partner only.' So even if the customer wants to go direct with us, we say, ‘No, sorry, you need to work with partner X or partner Y.'”

Also new, if a partner brings a new PC customer to Dell, they will receive incentives in back-end rebates, which Brousse said had increased significantly this year for all new customers. These accounts will also be protected for the future.

“A lot of partners always have the feeling that if you start to work with Dell, what will happen if a customer wants to go direct in six months? I can understand that. The reality now is that they don’t need to ask this question anymore. With partner-first, all these accounts are tagged ‘channel.' The job of the team is to explain to customers that, ‘No, you have to continue to work with the partner.’ That’s a big change in the way that we manage the PC business.”

Also new, if a partner brings a new PC customer to Dell, they will receive incentives in back-end rebates, which Brousse said had increased significantly this year for all new customers. These accounts will also be protected for the future.

“A lot of partners always have the feeling that if you start to work with Dell, what will happen if a customer wants to go direct in six months? I can understand that. The reality now is that they don’t need to ask this question anymore. With partner-first, all these accounts are tagged ‘channel.' The job of the team is to explain to customers that, ‘No, you have to continue to work with the partner.’ That’s a big change in the way that we manage the PC business.”