Joyce Mullen, President of Global Channels, OEM & IoT Solutions at Dell Technologies gratifies the channel contribution and sets the ball rolling for Dell Technologies World 2019
Ahead of the Dell Technologies World 2019, which is scheduled to take place in two weeks from now in Las Vegas, Joyce Mullen, President of Global Channels, OEM & IoT Solutions at Dell Technologies, along with Tian Beng, Dell EMC’s Senior Vice President and General Manager, Channels, APJ, visited India and highlighted the major contribution made by the channel business globally as well as in India. So far, in the APJ region, Dell’s channel business has grown faster than the global average. Not to one’s surprise, the India region has emerged as one of the largest channel regions for Dell Technologies. The domestic market has also gained the highest score in the net promoter score.
After all of the changes at Dell Technologies over the past couple of years, with the merger of EMC and privatisation of ownership, it is interesting to note that over half of the business (51 per cent) now flows through the indirect channel. Leading this monumental change, Mullen informs, “It has added over US$ 11 billion in revenue on the top line and has boosted channel revenue in 2018 to represent more than 50 per cent of Dell Technologies’ overall sales. The vision of being simple, predictable, and profitable has gone well with the partners. In all the conversations I have had with partners this year, I was amazed by their commitment and active participation. We treat their feedback seriously as it helps in setting our priorities, raise the bar and leap beyond the status quo.”
The three strategic initiatives that the company laid out last year for partners remain unchanged. The infrastructure giant will continue to work deeper towards making partners work easily, transact and engage across the family of businesses of Dell Technologies – including Dell, Dell EMC, VMware, SecureWorks, Pivotal, RSA and Virtustream among others. The company is also helping partners embrace and monetise new technologies. “We are starting to see significant interest in AI, machine learning, augmented reality and IoT; and we will be working with partners across the spectrum of these emerging technologies. Nevertheless, the traditional PC, servers and storage segment continued to see healthy growth in the channel business,” says Mullen.
Providing a perspective on what works for the local region and its channel, Anil Sethi, Vice President – Channels, Dell EMC India, states, “We have been consistent with our channel strategies, which are very critical for the partner’s success. We are seeing our partners engage in more meaningful end-to-end conversations. The fact that we differentiate with the breadth of our portfolio, from the edge to the core, and to the cloud, is resonating very well with the channel ecosystem. Today, we work with all major partners in India and we see that trust and comfort of partners growing every year.”
In the last fiscal, channel programs saw major refinements which worked well with the channels. For instance, improvement in rebate programs has resulted in strong uptake in storage, servers, and data protection business. The newly launched ‘Partners Preferred Program’ has helped the company bring incremental level of predictability into partner engagement. “We manage our partners in a very individualised manner and each one of our partners works with the account manager. We are focusing more on bringing capabilities and understanding the workloads in data centres, operating in multi-cloud environments, and building niche capabilities for AI, digital cities, manufacturing, and telecom,” Mullen puts in.
Moving forward, Dell Technologies will set the ball rolling for its partners. The upcoming mega channel event will set new directions for both traditional as well as born-in-cloud partners. The journey to digital transformation in delivering transformational solutions and navigating unchartered territories will continue to be a focus area. Application, security, cloud, and data centre workloads will see more thrust from the company. The ultimate goal of the new framework is to allow partners make more money by selling multiple lines of business and penetrating deeper into customer environments through a one-stop-shop IT provider.
“The goal for partners in 2019 is to go broader and deeper in the portfolio and build relationship with their customers. Partners who sell three lines of business grew 20 times faster than partners who sell just one with us – that’s huge. Dell Technologies has set its sights on breaking through the US$ 70 billion revenue barrier with the channel after enjoying strong growth with partners in 2018,” concludes Mullen.
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