Dell EMC wants to double its UK business in the UK and Ireland and needs more partners to do so.
UK channel boss Rob Tomlin told the gathered throngs at Tech Data Live that more than half of the tech giant’s $91 billion revenue comes from its channel partners.
Tomlin said that he was surprised how many of its partners don’t understand its Channel programme and how to make rebates or profitability and explained the vendor’s Gold, Platinum and Titanium tiers.
Many many men
Hundreds and hundreds of channel delegates here at the Canalys Channel Forum in Barcelona have one thing in common and that is that to the best of our knowledge the majority of the blokes here have willies.
But that may change in the future and reliable sources at one of the Big Six vendors here at the conference agrees with Dell and EMC and thinks that it is likely that change in the gender gap in the channel community will happen sooner rather than very much later.
Dell EMC, without being personal, agreed with that view and has already put in place several programmes to assist both its channel partners and employees working with it to welcome diversity.
It has set up both a woman’s partner network and a unit promoting female entrepreneurs, a company representative said. Dell EMC has achieved near parity with approximately 45 percent of its staff women.
It is also actively encouraging young girls to develop their computer science skills, and also has a programme to allow its male employees to emphasise with the strengths women can bring to the industry. It promotes diversity in all fields.
A male executive at the conference who spoke on the condition he and his company remained anonymous, told ChannelEye: “Women traditionally find themselves on the PR and marketing side. Women are more efficient than men. They get things done and when they say they’re going to do something they do it, unlike men.”
Which, of course, begs many questions and there are more questions than answers.
A bevy of senior Dell EMC executives spoke to a bevy of tech hacks this morning and spelled out in detail their promise of reseller goodnesses for their mega storage and server businesses.
Speaking at the Canalys Channel Forum in sunny Barcelona, the company was quick to say it was prepared for the British exit from the EU (Brexit) from day one, and even before day one. It is talking to the UK government and to other bodies and organisations to ease the transition if and when and however it comes.
But, and relating to its channel strategy, Dell EMC said it had given its resellers a lower price, and “that forms a strong incentive to the channel. Large accounts worldwide are wide open. If our partners win that business they’re protected.”
Dell EMC’s Michael Collins showing determination
Dell EMC said it will be a partner led strategy.
“Speaking to our partners and what they want from us is to look at the opportunities that exist in our enterprise business. We have to give them the ability to sell right across the range of Dell’s product portfolio.
“We’ve looked at where the opportunities are for the channel. We’re putting a commitment to the channel in order to invest and win incremental business, to be protected and we’ve introduced “partner of record” – that means the customer is locked to the partner for a period of a year. It’s exactly what our partners asked for.”
Dell EMC said there are two flavours of its preferred programme.
“It’s not just for enterprise customers but we’ve expanded this to include commercial as well. The benefit for the partner is really simple. When partners sell more, they make more margin and revenue and it gives incremental opportunities. This is very much based around our storage portfolio.”
Further, Dell EMC is pushing into its enterprise IoT business for large organisations and will offer eight bundles aimed at specific environments.”
It’s the software that is the secret, the company claimed, and the bundles are related to large requirements such as energy requirements for connected organisations.
“It is not going to pay all the bills this year, next year or even the year after. These are early attempts to figure out how to promote this technology. We have IoT training for customers and partners and have made this available through our distributors.”
Around a half of its enterprise storage and server offerings are fulfilled through the channel, the company claimed.
Dell EMC is closing the gap on Hewlett Packard Enterprise as EMEA’s top server vendor.
Beancounters at IDC have added up some numbers and divided by their collective shoe size and claimed that Dell EMC saw its server market share in EMEA increase just over three percentage points to 22.4 percent in Q2. HPE’s numbers were disappointing, and it declined over three per cent to 28.4 percent.
IDC senior research analyst Kamil Gregor said total spend for the quarter was up 28.9 percent year on year to $4.1 billion with HPE making up over a quarter of these sales. The number of shipments, however, declined 3.7 percent to 515,000 units shipped.
Some of the largest markets in Europe experienced shipment declines, with Germany seeing a drop of 14 percent and the UK a decline of 8.7 percent. These two regions, however, experienced revenue growth of 23.2 percent and 29.9 percent respectively as the average order of shipments rose.
Lenovo has been talking to its channel partners about its planned partnership with NetApp as it prepares its Dell EMC counter attack.
The pair announced that they would be working together at the Lenovo Transform 2.0 event in New York. The stated aim was to bring flash storage products to market and a joint venture in China to deliver localised solutions for that market was mentioned.
Kirk Skaugan, executive vice-president and president of the datacentre group at Lenovo, said the NetApp partnership would significantly broaden and solidify the company’s growth in the datacentre business and help to improve profitability. Lenovo was operating in every market such as telcos, MRI scanners ultrasound, wind turbines and embedded Xeon edge devices.
Lenovo used Tranform to reveal its ThinkShield security , which it has worked on with Intel. MobileIron and Absolute. There was a laptop launch with the firm adding the ThinkPad X1 Extreme to the high end range aiming it at ‘advanced users and prosumers’. We never understood what promusers meant, and suspect an expert at the University of Marchitecture thought it up.
Tech Data’s Advanced Solutions boss Rob Tomlin is set to join Dell EMC as UK channel VP, replacing Sarah Shields who is headed off to greener pastures in a more European role.
Shields announced in June that she would become VP of enterprise channels but said she would stay on in Blighty until a suitable replacement had been found.
Tech Data has announced to staff that Rob Tomlin will be leaving to join Dell EMC as VP of channels.
“Rob has been a key player in the integration of both SDG and Avnet into the Tech Data business and we thank him for the work he has done in setting up the Advanced Solutions division. “He leaves a very strong management team behind him in which we have every confidence. The leadership of the Advanced Solutions management team will be picked up by [UK MD] David Watts and we have total belief that the division will continue to grow and build upon the value it is bringing to the channel.”
Tomlin is expected to set up in Shield’s office early in Q4.
Dell EMC has launched a new enterprise partner programme which it claims will deliver “more predictability in engagements, more front-end margins and more speed and simplicity around quotes and deal registration.”
Dell EMC’s channel chief Joyce Mullen, said the Enterprise Preferred Channel Programme aims to simplify its sales engagement and be more prescriptive about how its sales teams and partners work together.
“We’re looking at ways for how we can incentivise and support our partners as they engage with us on these large enterprise opportunities”, Dell EMC’s UK&I VP of sales, Sarah Shields told Microscope.
“We’re looking at closer, deeper relationships with sales teams, a more managed way of working together through strategic account planning, access to technology, additional financial reward and working more collaboratively.”
Mullen said the programme included a dedicated channel team to support sales engagement in Enterprise Preferred accounts.
Dell EMC was giving partners “the greater front-end margin they asked for”, offering a new ‘acquisition’ deal registration with an incremental discount tied to it for eligible storage opportunities.
Dell EMC has been telling the world about its latest offerings designed to power what it calls the modern data centre, and to help customers achieve their IT, security and workforce transformations.
Jeff Clarke, Dell EMC’s vice chairman of products and operations, told the assorted throngs at t Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas that everything comes down to helping customers deal with the massive increase in data they will be receiving in the coming years, including managing, analysing, storing and protecting it.
A number of the technology trends powering digital transformation include immersive and collaborative computing, new ways to work, a modern PC experience for the workforce; the internet of things (IoT), software-defined “everything” and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, Clarke said.
“So when I think about all of that and all of the devices coming, we will need more technology to help customers deal with all of this data”, he said.
Dell EMC unveiled new storage and server technologies, hyperconverged infrastructure and cloud offerings. Dell and Dell EMC will provide AI, machine learning and deep-learning capabilities from the desktop to the data centre.
The company showed off some of its new PowerEdge MX modular infrastructures. We expect to see more details later on these products later in the year.
Virtustream, a Dell Technologies company, launched the next generation of its risk management and continuous compliance monitoring solution. It also unveiled the Virtual Cloud Network with new VMware NSX networking and security portfolio.
“I think it’s a huge opportunity for us to collaborate with our partners and extend the Dell brand, to extend Dell Technologies’ reach into a broader set of customers to help them solve their IT transformation/digital transformation, and we’re excited about that opportunity”, Clarke said.
Partner feedback has been “overwhelmingly positive that we are highlighting the right things that are shaping our industry, which is shaping our roadmap and is what our customers are asking for”, he said.
“They were very excited to see us respond”, Clarke said. “In fact, I announced our ReadyStack solution that is a channel-exclusive offer that is for the converged space, and it was received overwhelmingly positive[ly].”
Joyce Mullen, Dell EMC’s global channel, OEM and IoT president, said partners are “really leaning” into these new technologies.
Dell EMC saw its revenue jump 21 percent in the third quarter thanks to double-digit growth in the server department.
For the three months ending 3 November, Dell’s revenue increased to $19.6 million while operating losses narrowed 65 percent to $533 million.
Dell EMC saw revenue jump 26 percent to $5.9 billion. The revenue was split evenly between the two segments, with servers and networking jumping 32 percent and storage up 19 percent.
Dell chief financial officer Tom Sweet said: “In the third fiscal quarter, we delivered solid performance across the business.
“Moving forward, we’ll maintain our focus on profitable growth, generating strong cashflow and delivering a comprehensive and seamless solutions portfolio, incorporating the capabilities of all the companies under Dell Technologies.”
Dell’s client solutions division, which encompasses PCs and notebooks, saw growth of eight percent to $9.2 billion.
VMware revenue saw its revenue up 52 percent to just under $2 billion.
Dell EMC has signed an agreement with Microsoft to provide w Azure Stack through its channel partners.
Dell EMC was announced as one of three hardware vendors launching the Azure Stack, alongside HPE e and Lenovo. Cisco has since been added. The Azure Stack is an extension of Microsoft Azure, bringing the cloud capabilities to on-premise environments. The solution started shipping earlier this month.
Dell EMC also announced a range of services and updates around backup, data protection and hyperconverged infrastructure management.
“Dell EMC values the strong collaboration we have had with Microsoft for more than 30 years, which has resulted in world-class, innovative solutions delivered to customers worldwide”, said Armughan Ahmad, senior VP at Dell EMC. No surprises there, then.
“The innovations we’re announcing today are evidence of how our work with Microsoft has truly changed how our customers conduct their day-to-day activities, enabling them to gain greater value from their IT infrastructures and, more importantly, develop and deliver services to help achieve their ultimate business goals.”
Eamon Moore, managing director at Dell EMC and Microsoft partner EMIT, said the partnership means partners can offer a solution to customers no matter how they want their infrastructure to look.
“A lot of customers will have been very pro Microsoft and pro Azure but might not have been able to adapt for certain reasons”, he said. “Now companies that partner with both [Dell EMC and Microsoft] can give a solution no matter what the requirements are.
“If you look at the future of cloud, we’re seeing, for various reasons, that customers might need to go with a hybrid approach, so it fits perfectly into that. We all see that hybrid is the future, so this will give all the advantages and solutions available on Azure in a hybrid platform.
“It’s almost the missing piece to now give an overall solution to customers and not be hindered by certain assets [that need to remain on-premise] that you might have been hindered by in the past.”
Dell EMC says it has a “zero-tolerance policy” to such fights between its sales teams and channel partners.
As part of its channel charm offensive, Dell has been telling anyone who will listen that it will tackle any conflict between its direct business and channel partners.
Sarah Shields, vice president and general manager for Dell EMC’s channel in UK and Ireland, has been concerned that there have been a couple of cases where the direct organisation and a channel organisation have had challenges.
She said that if a partner has a deal registration in place and that deal registration is comprised by Dell-EMC’s direct business the company had a zero-tolerance policy.
The same is true if a partner breaks Dell-EMC’s rules of engagement in an area like the grey market. She added that Dell-EMC has a high level of trust with the channel and if any trust breaks down, it will fix it.
The merger has created a few problems but the company had been growing in multiple areas – particularly high-end enterprise accounts- she claimed.
After the launch of its first ‘distributor-exclusive product line’ in July, Shields has promised further channel-exclusive offerings.
“The channel is worth $35 billion of Dell-EMC’s organisation, so it is extremely important and the company wants to have the right solutions for our channel partners”.
Dell EMC has released a set of “enhancements” for its channel partners.
As you might expect, cloud computing featured heavily in the programme revisions. Dell EMC is keen to encourage its partners in the area, which is making it a bomb.
The Dell EMC Networking X-series will also become the vendor’s first distributor-exclusive product line. The X-Series is a family of web-managed 1GbE and 10GbE switches, designed for SMBs.
The outfit has expanded its client incumbency programme for the commercial segment, claiming that it will protect partners’ relationships with historical look-back for revenue and deal registration.
Virtustream has added its enterprise cloud solution platform to the partner programme. The idea is that it will provide “customers with public cloud consumption with private cloud performance”.
Dell EMC has been talking up its “flexible consumption models” through the channel with Cloud Flex, storage offering Flex on Demand and PC-as-a-service packages on certain product portfolios.
It expanded 2017’s Cloud Service Provider and Strategic Outsourcer track, alongside offering rebates based on sell-in revenues.
Michael Collins, senior vice president, channel at Dell EMC EMEA said that the developments underline Dell EMC’s strategy to position its partners as strategic advisers that enterprises can trust.
“We want our customers to know that Dell EMC’s partner ecosystem is steadfastly committed to understanding their immediate and future business IT needs.
“We believe that our latest updates to the Dell EMC Partner Programme make us the leading long-term technology provider of choice to help channel partners satisfy their customers and guide them along their IT infrastructure transformation journey”, added Collins.
The introduction of a unified channel by Dell-EMC earlier this year meant there were winners and losers in the move.
According to Microscope, the move to weld together partners from the two firms has meant that “inappropriate” behaviour has caused it to terminate people inside the firm as well as dump partners who refused to toe the new line or behave in a way that didn’t please the giant conglomerate.
But, nevertheless, Dell-EMC claims that its move to weld together what were separate channel partners has been largely successful.
Cheryl Cook, says Microscope, is over the moon with the results of its move, particularly so in the UK.
She, apparently, will have no hesitation in wielding the stick and enforcing the new rules in the company’s attempt to use the merger to deliver cross selling and has trained up its channel to take advantage of what she sees as good opportunities for revenue growth.
Dell EMC, Nutanix,and Hewlett-Packard are the key players in the global converged infrastructure market, according to a new report from Transparency Market Research (TMR).
TMR said that these companies are known to offer best on-premise data centres in a hybrid cloud world and are expected to look at geographical expansion through mergers and acquisitions and meaningful collaborations to increase their reach.
Business expansion through investment will also be an important strategy adopted by the players in the global market.
According to the research report, the global converged infrastructure market is expected to be worth $76.26 billion by the end of 2025 from $11.78 billion in 2016.
During the forecast years of 2017 and 2025, the global market is expected to surge at a CAGR of 22.4 percent. Amongst the various end users in the global market, the telecommunications and IT sector is estimated to show dominance over the forecast period.
By the end of 2025, this sector is likely to acquire a share of 34.2 percent in the global market. From a geographic point of view, North America is slated to account for a share of 39.5 percent in overall market by the end of 2025.
The global converged infrastructure market is expected to witness a healthy growth rate in the coming years as several organisations are investing in upgrading their IT infrastructure. Converged infrastructure includes servers, virtualization, networking, storage, and along with other resources that are holistically managed.
The demand for these systems is expected to remain consistent due to their single point of storage. The emerging trend of organisations to opt for solutions that provide better security, scale, agility, and simplicity is also expected to have a positive influence on the global market.
The report said that small and mid-sized organisations were taking a keen interest in adopting converged solutions cutting down IT operational costs has become imperative in the dynamic global economy.
Beancounters at Gartner have added up some numbers and divided them by their shoe size and reached the conclusion that Dell EMC has taken over from HPE as the king of the server market.
HPE still makes more money holding 24.1 percent of the market share – down from 25.2 percent in the first quarter of 2016. But it would seem that Dell EMC is catching up in that too, with its market share increasing by 4.8 percent to over the same period to take 19 per cent market share in the latest quarter.
Gartner research director Adrian O’Connell said that the first quarter of the year tends to be relatively strong for Dell, but the acquisition of EMC was proving positive for the server business at the moment.
“HPE’s size means it is subject to the moves of the wider market more than some other vendors. Weakness in the business segment and sourcing changes in the service provider space have reduced its revenue significantly.”
Worldwide server sales continue to decline with the growth of cloud computing, Gartner’s figures show. Companies are also opting to move to hyperscale infrastructures, buying lower cost servers from ODMs too, meaning total worldwide server revenue declined 4.5 per cent year-on-year, with shipments falling by 4.2 percent.
EMEA was impacted more than the rest of the world, with the region’s revenues reducing by 12.2 percent year-on-year to $2.8 billion in the first quarter of 2017 and shipments totaling 503,000 – a reduction of eight percent year-on-year.
IBM and Lenovo most felt the squeeze, with revenues reducing by 34 percent year-on-year and 16 percent year-on-year respectively. Lenovo’s shipments also shrank by 26 percent.
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