Dell EMC Improves Services Opportunity for Partners

DELL EMC WORLD — Attaching services to a sale was one of the four things that Dell EMC Channel Chief John Byrne asked of partners at Dell EMC World 2017/Partner Summit — the other three: grow their top line and grow faster; sell more across the portfolio; and bring new business to the company. Why services? Because customers say that service, support and the ease of implementation are the top criteria for an infrastructure partner. Also, because it’s a lucrative opportunity for partners.

Take for example the 12 global partners who received the Partner Quality Service Award — together driving more than $600 million over the past year.  Presidio, which was one of the 12, also snatched the Global Services Deliver Partner of the Year Award.

“Partners tell us that services are an opportunity to accelerate revenue, to improve customer loyalty and increase profitability,” Erica Lambert, vice president, global channel services, shared with partners.

There’s a lucrative rebate for partners who resell Dell EMC services — up to 1 percent of overall revenue that’s in the partner program, not of the services themselves. Partners can also obtain certifications to deliver services that benefit their customers — Dell EMC does this through consulting services, deployment services, support services, and training and education services.

How partners sell services is up to them. Lambert pointed out that there are three key ways to sell services: attach, complement and accelerate.

Partners that attach services, such as ProSupport, earn rebates. ProSupport services proactively reduce downtime, reduce customer effort and maximize productivity.{ad}

The complementary route to selling services is to augment a partner’s service offerings with those from Dell EMC. The recently launched ProSupport for Clients is an example of how partners can do this. Partners who sell the ProSupport Co-deployment Opportunity Suite could get reimbursement as they deploy the technology — and get the rebate.

Finally, partners can accelerate with the Intelligent Data Mobility offer for faster data migration, for example. “Data migration is painful for customers and difficult to manage,” said Lambert. This offer allows Dell EMC to use best-of-breed experience, automation and tools to reduce file migration time, reduce the time to map the environment, and reduce remediation.

This offer is vendor and platform agnostic.

According to Dell EMC, there’s a $75 million rebate opportunity available for partners who attach services.

Cyndi Privett, vice president of research and cofounder of Viewpoint Research, told us that Dell EMC has a better messaging for partners about services today compared to seven months ago at Dell EMC World 2016.

“The services messaging has come a long way, although it’s still not very crisp,” she said, adding that there’s still work to be done to bring together Dell’s services portfolio and EMC’s services portfolio.