Dell Technologies Boosts Revenue as Dell Digital Way Accelerates

At the same time that Dell Technologies takes on a modernization project for its own organization, called Dell Digital Way, the vendor, nine months in as a publicly traded company, posted $23.4 billion in revenue last quarter — up 2%  year on year.

Dell Digital Way, the vendor’s multiyear infrastructure transformation effort, will also benefit partners by simplifying doing business with Dell.

Dell’s Cheryl Cook

“As we transform our own company, we too are looking at modernizing our capabilities and, most certainly, integrating the back office capabilities of bringing Dell and EMC together,” Cheryl Cook, senior vice president, global partner marketing at Dell, told Channel Futures. “It will express itself most immediately — you’ve heard us continually reinforce that we’re focused on simplifying the operations experience for our partners.”

Cook said that Dell will utilize AI machine learning (ML) and robotics to modernize its own infrastructure.

“We’re drinking our own champagne,” she said.

The recent earnings were followed by some organizational announcements. Jeff Boudreau, president and general manager, storage, Dell EMC, was appointed president of the integrated systems group (ISG) to the lead server, storage and networking business, which includes the VxRail hyperconverged business and data protection business. The company also announced that Jennifer Felch will become the first chief digital officer a new role at Dell. Felch’s previous role was senior vice president in the office of the CIO.

Dell’s Jennifer Felch

Felch will work on Dell Digital Way, modernizing tools, improving the digital experience, automation, and getting partners to a common, simplified, single and integrated quoting environment. Dell Digital Way will help partners across the vendor’s portfolio of products as well as simplify self-service and onboarding. As new products are brought to market, they will go into the new quoting environment.

“We will help our sales teams and partners to collaborate around configurations, with broader visibility and order checkout online capabilities,” said Cook.

Dell Digital Way includes a marketing initiative, particularly around the buyer’s journey. The vendor is investing in ways to modernize to meet its customers and partners where they are on their search and buyer’s journey to serve up the most relevant, tailored content before they ever engage with a salesperson.

Back to Dell’s financial performance stats, the company has grown its channel business to $52 billion in revenue as measured by orders. Additionally, as the company closes the first half of its fiscal year, the channel grew 11% on the top line. That growth ties to paying out more rebates – 8%, according to Cook.

Dell’s Jeff Boudreau

“A piece of evidence that we monitor and is a great example of the proposition for the partners is the cross-sell opportunity. We’re seeing that partners who engage in multiple lines of business, more comprehensive types of solutions and engagements with customers — those partners who sell three lines of business or more grow at 8.6% faster than partners who only sell two. And, they grow at 29.3% faster than partners who sell only one line of business,” said Cook.

Looking at revenue by line of business, client revenue, measured by order in the first half of the fiscal year, grew 6%; server business was up 13%; and Dell’s storage business, including HCI and data protection, was up 15% year over year.

“Even in a contracting, consolidating client and server business we continue to take share and we’re seeing extreme growth in our converged infrastructure. Our VxRail platform has been met with amazing results and you saw that we brought [VMware Cloud Foundation] in that environment, which now gives a simplified management and orchestration experience into the Kubernetes container environment in VMware,” said Cook.

Also, in the first half of the fiscal year, partners brought 34,685 net new customers, helping Dell in a big way. As a result, deal registration volumes are up — more than 382,000 deal registrations.

Dell hasn’t lost sight of training for partners, not just for maintaining tier status but also for new product training, such as VxRail or Dell Technologies cloud platform. In the first half of the fiscal year, Dell delivered 44,700 individual credentials in 2,100 partner companies.