LAS VEGAS – At the Global Partner portion of the Dell Technologies World conference, the company’s new channel chief Joyce Mullen announced five new channel programs focused on digital transformation, security and the new workforce dynamic.
What Dell has done is create a framework for these new programs along with the overall Dell EMC Partner Program announced two years ago by then channel chief John Byrne. Called the Dell Technologies Advantage Framework, it will guide channel partners to view and choose program tools and incentives across all these programs including the main umbrella program. Each program will be run independently.
Chief among the new programs is an increase in incentives to partners. Scott Millard, Dell’s Vice President of Global Channels Specialty Sales, outlined the new incentives to be valued at $5 billion and based on partner opportunity to refresh for storage with attached Pro-Support Plus services. The program is called MyRewards and Dell will be offering a two per cent bonus on any mid-size product refreshes, but margins will also be stackable and include rebates. What’s new is the targeting of partner sales reps. These new incentives will be paid out to them and can see a rep earn one to three per cent more based on the value of the deals up to $30,000 from selling modern infrastructure, new customer wins, and competitive swaps.
MyRewards will also target sales engineers as well as the sales reps and the program works as opt-in with points accrued. This program replaces the old Partner Advantage and Sell & Earn programs.
Millard also announced a channel only initiative from Dell called the Ready Stack of certified reference systems. The strategy behind this new initiative is to help speed up channel partners’ getting into the marketplace for converged infrastructure supporting Dell EMC gear and VMware solutions. The Ready Stack offering will focus on storage, servers, networking and data security products that could also include containers.
Millard said this was an area the company was not in before. “We are putting together – for the channel – something they can be confident in and make it an alternative in the marketplace where they can build a solution from the edge, to the core to the cloud,” he said.
Dell Canada channel chief Deanna Thompson told EChannelNews that the Ready Stack has not launched yet in Canada, but the plan is to follow the global release plan.
“The key here is to take this stack and accelerate it with partners in Canada. This is a channel only initiative and this plays well with our growth in the channel. From a year ago, the channel in Canada was with 1.8 lines of business and today it’s at 2.3 and we see that growing further,” she said.
Thompson added that the Ready Stack is a large offering for the channel, but since these are validated solutions it will give them confidence they can enable customers right away. One of her own Canadian initiatives is to use the Ready Stack program to go after the mid-market space in the country that will be partner-led.
Dell EMC also announced four new solutions competencies that will be highlighted by the Internet of Things (IoT) Solution Competency. The others are:
· High Performance Computing;
· Data Analytics;
· Business Applications; and
· Security.
There will also be a new demo program for tiered partners which will give the channel an opportunity to show off storage, converged infrastructure and hyper-converged solutions to customers. Thompson said this is the first time Dell EMC has ever done a demo program and it will use earned MDF dollars, but the solution providers will have an opportunity to resell these demo units after six months.
There is also a Proof of Concept or POC program that will also be partner-led and what Dell is doing here is trying to give the channel a fast approval process. This program has no-cost hardware, software, pro-support and shipping benefits.
Dell is putting some marketing muscle to support these programs with the IT Transformation campaign that will have new content focused on the buyer journey toward digital transformation. Partners will get access to analyst data to help them build their new solution cases for customers inside this campaign.
Finally, Mullen revealed who the Titanium Black partners are. They are: Atea, Bechtle, CDW, ComputeraCenter, Fusion Storm, Insight, Itochu, SHI, Swisscon and WorldWide Technology. Of those global partners, CDW, Insight, SHI and WorldWide Technology are in Canada.
