Images: Top-Performing Dell Partners Celebrate Growth
Synapse360, CAE, Softcat, CCS Media and SCC all reveal what it’s like working with Dell during its U.K. Partner Summit.
![Rob Tomlin Dell UK at Dell UK Partner Summit Rob Tomlin Dell UK at Dell UK Partner Summit](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt61fa0114ed31f2c0/6524205bcba3a2304290d190/Rob-Tomlin-Dell.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Synapse360 was acquired by Manx Telecom in 2019, at which time Steve Douglas took over as managing director. Since then the Manchester-based firm has looked to switch from selling kit to running a services business.
“We’ve been working with Dell Bank over the last two years to transform everything that we do into a service. That’s really hit a sweet spot with customers,” said Douglas.
“CIOs don’t like asking for £2 million with capital investment. It’s not the way people buy cars; it’s not the way people think of IT anymore. They think of cloud. They think of subscribing. They go online and say, ‘I’ll have a little bit of their service.’”
Synapse360, he said, has been transforming its infrastructure and storage offerings into subscription-based services.
“It’s worked out really well for us. We did have a great year last year. Hopefully we’ll continue to have one,” he said.
“Synapse had just a breakout year last year,” said Rob Tomlin, VP, UK channel for Dell Technologies. “We grew from strength to strength in customer acquisition, the technology lines. Their reputation amongst our Dell seller community just goes from strength to strength. We’ve got many very good platinum partners and the platinum tier grew last year. Synapse were just head and shoulders [ahead].”
Douglas said it was “a strategic decision” for Synapse360 to work exclusively with Dell in certain areas of the business.
“We’re not big enough to go out and be big with lots of vendors. So really, we’re concentrating on Dell. Historically, it’s worked well for us. It gives us credibility when we go in to see a customer for the first time to be able to go in arm-in-arm with Dell. Everyone’s heard of Dell. So it’s important to us to be able to go in and say, ‘This is what gives us credibility. This is why we should be at the table. This is why you should be talking to Synapse360.’
“We’ve got some innovative ideas of how we might push the boundaries of that over the next six months and maybe do something even closer together. And if we can manage that without upsetting other Dell partners, then I think that we can really do a good piece of business together.”
CAE is a top Cisco partner in the U.K. – and is still on track to grow that business by 30% this year. However, the firm has also been growing its Dell business of late. CAE CEO Justin Harling said the firm has been attracted to the “incredible” breadth of the Dell portfolio. It is especially interested in Dell’s storage, data protection and resilience solutions.
CAE’s burgeoning Dell business is reflected in its award for business development.
“Dell has been really good at setting up programs to get out there and attack business, which have worked really, really well for us. It’s certainly one of the reasons behind the behind the growth, because we like being in that position. It always feels better to be on the front foot,” explained Harling.
He said that the approach is well supported from a margin perspective.
“We know we can make money while doing business development, which can be a real challenge. So it’s been really good for that.
“That goal for Dell to be a $5 billion business in in the U.K. is one that we have a great deal of confidence in,” he added.
Historically aligned with the likes of HP, Compaq and IBM, SCC had never worked closely with Dell. That was until two years ago when the firms agreed the time was right to collaborate. Part of this involved hiring Arrow veteran Mark Russell as SCC’s Dell Technologies alliance manager.
“I was fully aware of that history was but I was also aware of what the opportunity could be,” said Russell.
The move is paying off, as evident in SCC winning Dell’s Breakthrough Award.
“Last year the SCC business grew exponentially,” said Tomlin.
Russell credited Dell’s management of the supply chain crisis as helping it achieve its status.
“From reseller perspective, we can see across the board. Dell has come out the strongest, and it has certainly contributed towards our success this year. Because being a privately owned company and as agile as we are, to offer alternatives with credible delivery times helps our credibility. It certainly helps,” he said.
SCC has reorganized its business units to represent enterprise, workspace management, security and networking. Dell now sits across all four.
“That edge-to-core-to-cloud message that Dell offers sits across all four of those tenants within SCC,” said Russell. “We trust each other, we collaborate and the collaboration between both sales teams has just been incredible.”
Tomlin described CCS Media’s customer acquisition for Dell in both the data center and client space has been “phenomenal” last year.
CCS managing director James Hardy said the award for Medium Business of the Year shouldn’t really be a surprise. The companies have been on a multiyear journey to grow the business together, he said.
“We talked about how we could build a joint partnership to grow the midmarket [and] SMB organization, which is the heartland of our company.”
CCS has 500 employees serving 10,000 customers. Much of that business was built around having a large breadth of technologies across the organization. However, CCS has started working with Dell to build depth into that breadth, said Hardy.
“Making sure that we have solutions teams, technical architects. They all have the technical capability that allows us to surround our end user customers with the IT team they need to support their workforce.”
Hardy also credited Dell’s supply chain management as being fundamental to the running of the business.
“Without that, we wouldn’t be able to support our customers. That’s been industry-leading. There’s not even a close second,” he said.
He added: “One thing that the Dell channel tees have brought in the last few years, which is really coming to fruition now, is real clarity. Clarity on how we partner, and when we partner. We really appreciate that that approach.”
Softcat is a huge channel player in the U.K. However, the CSG Award might be surprising given just a couple of years ago, Softcat “wasn’t a big CSG player.”
“We’ve worked with Softcat since we joined the channel in 2007. They were very early adopters of Dell. But at that point they weren’t a particularly a large client partner; they were a software partner. [But] over the last three years, during the pandemic, Softcat accelerated their client solutions business. And we jointly enjoy a great business, built on trust and predictability. Softcat is one of our fastest growing and largest players,” said Tomlin.
For his part, Softcat CEO Graeme Watt agreed that at the start of the pandemic, “we weren’t such a big CSG player across the whole company. We weren’t very good at it, frankly.
“The sales guys were a little bit wary of getting their hands on a device deal. Because it had a high chance of failure, there wasn’t much margin on it. But Dell has really helped us get our act together on CSG. We saw some big deals flying out the door early on in the pandemic and we were saying, ‘we don’t have those capabilities, but we sure as hell would like to.’
“Of course, the whole environment around the PC has changed. It’s gone from being something that people were calling the death of 10 years now to being the most key collaborative tool that the workforce can have.”
Watt also said that “Dell invests a lot of people, time and resource into us, and that’s really important. That helps us be effective. It helps us have the right accreditations and be an effective partner for Dell with our customers.”
Moving forward, he said Softcat was looking at partnering earlier with Dell on deals.
“We’re trying to shift that really close collaboration we’ve got at the customer level to earlier in the cycle. So working with a customer earlier and working with Dell earlier. And that creates a lot of stickiness in the deal for both of us and stop, other factors coming into play.”
Like Synapse360’s Douglas, Watt said another “strong string to Dell’s bow” is how it has been managing supply chain “ahead of the competition.”
“Dell has done a really good job of having that inventory available for us, either directly or through distribution. That’s been a key medium-term advantage,” he said.
Following the awards, Softcat’s Watt announced he would be stepping down as CEO in 2023. He will be handing the reins to Graham Charlton while he becomes chair of the board.
For now though, he said he will “continue to drive our business fast and hard over the next 12 months to deliver further future success.”
Following the awards, Softcat’s Watt announced he would be stepping down as CEO in 2023. He will be handing the reins to Graham Charlton while he becomes chair of the board.
For now though, he said he will “continue to drive our business fast and hard over the next 12 months to deliver further future success.”
Dell Technologies has recognized its top partners at its UK Partner Summit.
A total of 15 awards were up for grabs Dell partners. They recognized successes including new business and partner growth, and individual achievements across sales and technical teams. The in-person event in London – the first in three years – concluded with CDW receiving the Partner of the Year accolade.
Rob Tomlin (pictured above), VP, U.K. channel for Dell Technologies, described partner attendance and enthusiasm as “phenomenal.”
“It’s a great pleasure to recognize the sterling work of our partners in driving transformation and growth for British businesses. It’s especially gratifying to have everyone in the same room after three years apart. He added: “It’s a privilege to celebrate their achievements and to be part of this dynamic partner community.”
New Apprenticeship Scheme
The event was co-hosted by Dayne Turbitt, Dell’s U.K. SVP and general manager. Tomlin revealed Dell has doubled its channel business in last three years. Turbitt and Tomlin also announced a new U.K. apprenticeship program pilot, in partnership with Microsoft, to combat the skills gap.
“We’ve been working for a number of months now around helping support the talent divide in the marketplace. We’re working with Microsoft to help source talent in the marketplace, helping place them into our partners and co-fund where appropriate. Which has gone down really well,” said Tomlin.
Platinum Partner of the Year Synapse360 managing director Steve Douglas said the announcement was as highlight of the summit.
“We do struggle to get good talent into the partner businesses. I love the idea of getting younger innovators in the business, with new thoughts and ideas,” he said.
Dell Technologies Partner Award 2022 Recipients
CSR Partner of the Year: Insight
Services Partner of the Year: CDW
Medium Business Partner of the Year: CCS Media
Public Sector Partner of the year: Phoenix
Gold Partner of the Year:CSI
Platinum Partner of the Year: Synapse360
CSP Partner of the Year: NTT
CSG Partner of the Year: Softcat
Excellence in Marketing: Boxxe
Datacenter Partner of the Year: Computacenter
Excellence in New Business Development: CAE
Salesperson of the Year: Graham Wiggins and Nick Jones, Computacenter
Breakthrough Award: SCC
Distributor of the Year: Tech Data
Partner of the Year: CDW
Channel Futures spoke to some of the winners about growing their businesses and navigating market challenges. They also reveal how Dell is working to work more closely with its partners. See the slideshow above to hear from the Dell partners.
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