Just weeks after launching the unified Dell EMC Partner Program, the vendor Thursday homed in on and expanded the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) partner track. Dell EMC announced that it’s making investments to boost compensation benefits, increase sales and marketing efforts, and introduced a new Service Provider Solutions Engineering Practice.

The CSP track is one of the five partner-type tracks in the Dell EMC Partner Program. The other tracks are: Solution Provider, OEM, System Integrators (Alliances) and RSA.

“This [CSP] is a serious and high-growth business for us and we have about 200 resources within the company focused on the solution and go-to-market side of this business,” Jay Snyder, senior vice president, global alliances and service providers at Dell EMC, shared with us.

He also pointed out that the company currently has a multibillion-dollar run rate and the goal is to reach double-digit growth annually over the next three years in this market segment. To achieve that goal, Dell EMC hopes to add about 100 CSPs to the program to reach a total of 300 plus CSPs, globally, by year-end. The preference for new CSPs is by technology, or vertical use cases, or geography.  IDC predicts that over 85 percent of enterprises will commit to multi-cloud architectures by 2018 — the target of the Dell EMC CSP program track.{ad}

According to the vendor, CSPs include: communications service providers, cable multiple system operators, hosting/co-location providers, public cloud providers, vertical market cloud specialists and consumer webtech providers — all of which are positioned to play a critical role as business customers engage in digital transformation.

Taking a deeper dive into today’s announcement, enhancements to the CSP program track include:

“We’ve been running this program [The Cloud Partner Connect Initiative] for a while, we’ve tested it in some geographies, and we’re confident that with additional focus it’s an area that’s untapped and has more potential,”  David Trigg, global vice president market development and service providers with Dell EMC, told us.

Kevin Rhone, senior partnering consultant with the channel acceleration practice at Enterprise Strategy Group, said that the Dell EMC CSP track fits nicely into the …

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… overall program announced earlier this month. It includes the Status Match from the legacy programs and a range of incentives designed to create “tier envy” and motivate partners to invest to move up in tiers and receive training discounts, increased rebates, business development funds (BDF) and access to marketing and selling support.

“The ability to use BDF for different types of training and enablement, and for ‘as-a-Service’ solutions development – two areas that are often under-resourced in CSP development – is a differentiator,” he said. He also added, “I particularly like that the track recognizes the multiple sales motions that happen in the real world. The full range of sell-to, sell-with, sell-thru, sell-with, and sell-out options are broken out so partners can plan their go-to-market structure and investments accordingly.”

The other big news for the day is about the Dell EMC Service Provider Solutions Engineering Practice. This new practice is twofold: First, it provides investments to help service providers build out their own infrastructure for operations to serve their customers; and second, it offers service providers a range of tested and validated systems for a variety of use cases.{ad}

These validated systems include compute, storage and open networking solutions or building blocks that virtualize and automate workloads. In a blog, Tom Burns, senior vice president, Dell EMC Networking, Service Provider Solutions & Enterprise Infrastructure, noted that the initial focus will be on network functions virtualization (NFV) solutions for communications service providers:

For mobile operators:

For enterprise networks: