Dell Technologies Looks to Continue Channel Momentum Into New Year

As 2019 closed, Dell Technologies reported fiscal year 2020 third-quarter earnings, announced several major executive shifts, and, this week, Joyce Mullen, president, global channel, embedded and edge solutions, is sharing eight channel trends for 2020, gleaned from the vendor’s partner community.

Let’s also remember that Dell, a public company in 2019, forged an even tighter alliance with VMware, which acquired Pivotal and Carbon Black, while end-of-year talks about Dell offloading cybersecurity company RSA were loud and clear.

Dell’s Cheryl Cook

“The big picture for the partners [regarding the organizational changes] is this is one more step in our efforts at simplifying our overall go-to-market and single ownership in a line of management around all sales,” Cheryl Cook, senior vice president global partner marketing at Dell Technologies, told Channel Futures. “As our partners engage, it really doesn’t change the program, per se, or the programmatic initiatives that are available to partners, but it does help us harmonize and bring that together. We had enterprise preferred programs, commercial preferred, we had a lot of acquisition plays for our partners through tech refresh and the like, and all of that now will be consistently applicable across all of our customer segments.”

Some highlights of the organizational shifts at Dell include the announced retirement of Marius Haas, president and chief commercial officer, who officially departs the company at the end of this month. At the same time, Bill Scannell, president of enterprise sales and customer operations at Dell will assume the role as head of a unified sales force, meaning he adds the commercial segment to his role. Jeff Clarke also was promoted to president and chief operating officer.

Mullen continues to lead the overall global partner organization and will report to Scannell. Jay Snyder, vice president, alliances, global sales, will continue in his role.

Dell also simplified its specialty sales structure – which includes storage sales specialist, data protection sales specialist, global client sales specials, and so on – and the specialty sales organization will now reside under Steve Crowe, president, global commercial ISG sales, Dell EMC. For partners, Scott Mllard, senior vice president at Dell, will continue to lead that effort, but going forward the specialty functions, which include helping partners pursue customers, will provide role clarity and fewer people that need to be engaged in the decision making.

“The takeaway for partners and the benefit is simplification,” said Cook.

Globally, Aongus Hegarty, who led Dell’s EMEA organization, will lead international sales and be responsible for Latin America, APJ and greater China, in addition to Europe. John Byrne, president, North America commercial sales, will continue in his role.

Reporting on Dell’s momentum in the last quarter, Cook talked about Dell partners embracing the breadth of the portfolio and the cross-sell opportunity.

“We have evidence that partners who sell three lines of business – servers, storage and client, for example – generate nine-times revenue compared to a partner who sells two lines of business,” said Cook.

Compare that to partners selling three lines of business versus a single line –— those partners selling three lines earn 31 times the revenue.

Bring VMware into the equation, and the tight partnership between VMware and Dell, the payoff for partners is big. Partners who sell three lines of business with Dell and sell VMware generate 103 times more revenue than partners who only sell a single line of business, according to Cook.

“The opportunity [for partners] is resonating and it’s real for partners to engage in more complex, more comprehensive, stickier engagements and projects with their customers and leverage the breadth of the portfolio,” she said.

Looking at the channel in Dell’s fiscal-year quarterly results, the channel grew 4%, or 8% year to date. Distribution, as a route to market, grew at 7%, and 9% year to date.

Specific lines of business growth: Client business was up …

… 8% in the quarter, 7% year to date, but the server business took a dip, down 6% for the quarter but is up 7% for the year. Cook attributes that decline to macroeconomic conditions continuing, such as strong server growth for a number of years prior, and converged business growing at a rapid pace.

“Depending on workload, the offer and the solution, you can have standalone servers, or converged infrastructure, satisfy business needs — and I think all are happening,” she said.

Storage, including data protection and converged infrastructure, was up 4% for the quarter and 11% year to date.

“Frankly, our VxRail and converged offerings are resonating with the market. We had a few announcements this year with VMware’s Cloud Foundation (VCF) shipping with our VxRail offering; there was PowerOne for autonomous computing — we’re beginning to see the benefit of that collaborative engineering, and joint R&D capability across the family of companies,” said Cook.

In its fiscal third quarter, Dell had 17,000 net-new customers, thanks to partners, or 52,000 net-new businesses acquired or reactivated up to that point in time. With growth, deal registration and rebate payments were also up. Dell delivered over 16,600 credentials to partners, or almost 62,000 credentials year to date.

“We also encourage partners to work on their VMware certifications because it uniquely positions them as highly capable partners to help customers with their transformational pursuits,” said Cook.

Originations with Dell Financial Services was up 22% in Q3 and 13% year on year.

Looking ahead, Mullen shared eight trends for 2020, as per Dell partners. Those trends are: We evolve as partners adopt new business models; the channel embraces social impact; multicloud becomes table stakes; multicloud becomes a go-to market model; demand for flexible consumption models accelerates; artificial intelligence spending grows significantly; generic offerings no long cut it; and the journey to 5G continues.