Dell Working On Fulfilling Partner Demands as Apex Momentum Grows

DELL TECHNOLOGIES WORLD — Dell Technologies says it is building “really strong momentum” around its Apex services.

Apex, which delivers infrastructure as a service, launched in 2021. Akanksha Mehrotra VP, strategic planning – Apex portfolio marketing, outlined the opportunities at Dell Technologies World this week in Las Vegas.

Mehrotra said Apex services are gaining traction in sectors with specific data protection and sovereignty requirements. She maintained that partners can deliver the ease and agility of a cloud experience without giving up some of the control customers need for their data.

Dell’s Akanksha Mehrotra

“We’ve seen lots of traction for Apex services in the health care sector,” said Mehrotra. “The data requirements make it a pretty good fit for an Apex-type model, and we have partners who have expertise in that area.”

Mehrotra said other common use cases for Apex are in financial services, retail and media and entertainment. Here, she said, Dell Technologies “relies on partners for their vertical expertise and their industry specific expertise.”

Refer, Resell or Host

With Apex Flex On Demand financial services, partners can choose from different sales models, said Mehrotra.

“Referral partners can bring an opportunity to us and work with their customer to advise them. We’ll take care of the contracting if they don’t want to deal with that. A second model is where they take on all of that. We sell it to them, and they take on the contracting, and telemetry and billing, etc. Then there are hosted selling services. They could subscribe to the service from us, host it at their data center or wherever they run their business, and then build their practice on top of that.”

“The feedback we’ve heard is having a variety of ways in which they can transact these services is something they value.”

Partners can also provide their own full stack services on Apex. These include application specific services or migration services, as well as partner advisory services.

Partners Demand More

However, Dell Technologies partners are demanding broader availability of services worldwide. Not all three service models are available in every geography, for example. This is something that the company is working on, said Mehrotra.

“There are plans to expand in the second half for our international market, to make resale available,” she said.

Partners also want to resell the Apex Console, which allows customers to monitor and manage their services.

“Partners want to be able to include their services within that. Maybe put their logo on it and sell it to their customers,” said Mehrotra.

As such, Dell Technologies is looking at making the Console available via APIs to partners.

“You can expect this in the in the near future, rolling out in the second half [of 2022],” said Mehrotra.

Helping Partners Understand Opportunities

The exec said Dell Technologies is working with partners to help them understand the opportunity around Apex. It is helping them to configure, price, quote and qualify Apex deals.

“We’re doing a lot of the same things that we’re doing for our sales teams,” said Mehrotra. “Since we’ve introduced, we’ve been on a journey to transform our sales force so that they can start having these types of conversations. We’re sharing those same materials, tools, that same qualification guidance with our partners.”