Dell Technologies Unveils Significant Partner Program Enhancements

(Pictured above: Dell’s Joyce Mullen enjoys a rock star entrance at Dell Technologies World, April 29.)

DELL TECHNOLOGIES WORLD — As Dell Technologies rolls out its new branding and messaging, the vendor on Monday also announced simplified engagement, training and competencies, new badging and expanded opportunities around storage and next-generation cloud solutions. The news came today at Global Partner Summit, being held in conjunction this week with Dell Technologies World.

What up until today was known as the Dell EMC Partner Program, is now the Dell Technologies Partner Program. While the branding of the program has changed, the vendor is maintaining the core tenants of the benefits and requirements of the partner program, and tier status will remain the same. This rebranding has no impact on Dell’s strategically aligned businesses’ independent partner programs.

Dell’s Cheryl Cook

“But what this will do is enable and empower you to really have the power of the whole [Dell Technologies] brand,” said Cheryl Cook, senior vice president, global partner marketing at Dell Technologies.

The company remains committed to three strategic partner initiatives: making it easier to do business with Dell; solutions; and performance, Joyce Mullen, president, channel sales at Dell Technologies, told attendees.

Making it easier to do business with Dell means making its value proposition to partners real, simple, predictable and profitable.

To improve the end-to-end partner experience, Darren Sullivan, senior vice president, global partner strategy and business operations at Dell Technologies, introduced Dell Digital Way.

“To accelerate progress, we’re investing heavily in automation — we call this Dell Digital Way,” he said. “It is a strategy to develop a cohesive digital ecosystem to better serve you and our mutual customers.”

What this means to partners is that over the next year, Dell will create a seamless online experience across its businesses, with improvements across processes such as deal registration, quoting and ordering, rebate management and so on. In the second half of the year, Dell will introduce a self-service quoting and ordering experience for client, server and mid-tier storage.

Dell is also making enhancements in predictability including sales engagement and planning, and is creating a culture of partnering at Dell; the company is focusing on programs that create the opportunities, including expanding the number of eligible accounts with Dell’s commercial segment in the second quarter; is focused on deal registration; and is enforcing robust rules of engagement.

Mullen’s second imperative is fast-tracking partners’ ability to deliver transformational solutions and to make it easier to tap into the power of the Dell ecosystem. Cook talked about three areas of focus: the story, solutions and skill sets.

The story is about Dell Technologies, its rebranding and messaging, which includes four pillars: IT transformation, workforce transformation, security transformation and application transformation. Of course, taking the company public is also a core part of that story. Partners were shown the newly branded Dell Technologies tier logos.

Cook then talked about solutions. Here is how Dell Technologies is expanding the partner opportunity around storage and …

… next-generation cloud solutions:

The vendor also reinforced the value of its financial service offerings, including Flex on Demand, which was recently extended to Dell’s HCI solutions, including VxRail & VxRack.

On the education front, Dell Technologies announced two new solution badges composed of existing certifications to validate the capability to support and deploy across a solution. The new solution badges are for Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and Dell Technologies Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

Under the updated Dell Technologies Partner Program, the company announced a new cloud competency that will support the newly announced Dell Technologies Cloud solution. The competency will be composed of the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform Badge and few other certifications, including Services Delivery Competency on VxRail. Partners who earned this competency last year are ahead of the game since they already have the foundational deployment certifications for the new cloud competency. Full cloud competency certification requirements will be announced in the third quarter.

Dell Technologies Partner Program plans to recognize related credentials earned from its strategically aligned businesses that support the vendor’s joint solutions.

Finally, Mullen addressed the third imperative — performance, or monetizing emerging technologies. She talked about Dell’s AI-enabled products and IoT product bundles and looked at what to expect three to five years ahead — products will become more specialized and prolific, multiclouds will expand and become more complex, and AI will become IT’s number one customer.

“This will create a demand for data the likes of which we have never seen,” she said. “This increased complexity is all good news for you, as customers will need you more than ever.”

Not only will partners need to understand the technology, but they’ll need to understand the businesses that customers are in.

The channel drove over $50 billion in orders for Dell Technologies last year.