Dell EMC Beats the Drum on Partner Commitment, Predictable Engagements

DELL EMC WORLD — Dell EMC Global Channel Chief John Byrne didn’t take the stage in front of 4,000-plus partners at Dell EMC World 2017/Partner Summit, taking place this week in Las Vegas, to talk about how the company was tweaking its partner program. Instead, he talked about the company’s $35 billion global channel organization and how it is living up to commitments, including tightening its alignment with partners and taking out the friction, taking action on zero-tolerance deal registration, and striving to be the No. 1 partnering organization in the industry.

Just seven months ago at the initial Dell EMC World 2016/Partner Summit held in Austin, there were 1,500 partners in attendance.

“We want you to know that we cherish your investment and we know that you have choices,” Byrne said.

One mission for the company at this week’s conference is to help partners connect the dots between Dell EMC and the predictability of engagements.

Byrne told the audience about a new infrastructure incumbency — a two-year lookback on servers, storage and networking that will be implemented on May 22.

“That’s our commitment on how we will work with and through the partner and those customers,” he said. At the same time, May 22, the vendor is bringing in a client incumbency that’s forward looking.

Dell EMC had talked about expanding its Line of Business Incumbency Program back in February. The program is designed to make sure that accounts get designated to partners of record with customer accounts.{ad}

Also announced Monday was that Virtustream, a cloud services provider and Dell Technologies business, is now part of the Dell EMC Partner Program, which means that Dell EMC partners can partner with Virtustream.

Scott Millard, vice president, global channels and alliances at Virtustream, outlined what he called a “significant proposition,” when compared to other industry cloud partner programs. So, what’s in it for partners?: margin on monthly recurring revenue; Dell EMC partners can retire tier credit on bookings up to three years committed contract value in advance; they earn category A rebates; they can accrue MDF dollars; and there’s a significant services opportunity — for example, cloud strategy and advisory work, cloud migration and onboarding, application modernization and re-platforming, and various levels of application through infrastructure managed services, to name a few.

“Additionally what we’re doing that’s unique in the industry, is partners that sell as a financial agent or prime get to participate in future growth. So, as we grow together and bring more workloads over rather than it being a one-time event, partners participate in the growth with that client,” said Millard.

As part of Dell EMC’s strategy to accelerate IT transformation, the company also announced flexible consumption models from the desktop — PC as a service to the data center. The new payment model is from Dell Financial Services. The company talked about Flex on Demand for storage; Cloud Flex for HCI beginning with Dell EMC VxRail appliances and the Dell EMC XC Series. Expect to see Dell EMC VxRack Systems included in the offering later this year.

What does Cloud Flex mean for partners?

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According to Darren Fedorowicz, vice president, partner solutions, with Dell financial services, it means three things: Partners get full tier credit because they’re selling a service, not an asset; they own the sales campaign; and partners control the margin and product pricing.

“This is a differentiated solution, so partners can drive value out of this solution and they can sell at higher value which should translate into a higher margin,” Fedorowicz said.

Partners get paid 50 percent of the margin upfront; however, from the Dell EMC perspective, they’re only selling a service. As the customer extends, Dell EMC repays the margin and in the end, partners can make 125 percent of their original margin.{ad}

“We’re giving a margin annuity for the future and the line of business incumbency,” he explained. “So partners get all that value over time as well as being able to sell against public cloud for customers who want a different type of consumption model.”

Byrne did mention some things that he wanted from partners: to grow their top line and grow faster, as in double the growth; sell a richer portfolio or sell more lines of business; attach services; and bring new business to Dell EMC — there is a new business incentive in place.