Michael Dell

AUSTIN, TEX. – Once notoriously known for their aggressive direct sales model approach, Dell sees huge opportunities in the market and is bringing the channel along for the ride.

Dell World kicked off here on Tuesday to a packed house of over 5500 attendees according to rumours on the floor and on the estimated actual attendance. Close by over 650 PartnerDirect members are also working on building a vibrant partner ecosystem.

Dell is currently in year five of their transformation from a pure product company to a complete end-to-end organization, bringing the product, services and software to address the over $3 trillion global IT market. According to executives, demand has the potential of hitting $4 trillion as the need for information technology continues to grow.

With over 115,000 global partners, Dell is well positioned to address this growing need and the channel will benefit. According to Michael Dell, “Dell has integrated the best of all their partner programs in PartnerDirect. PartnerDirect has opened lots of opportunities for both the channel and Dell.”

Dell continues to bundle services and software into all their solutions and with the aquistion of many channel-friendly companies.

“Our multi-channel approach plays an important role in Dell’s go to market strategies,” Dell continued.

“Our clients want to use a single source for all their technology and having a trusted partner like Dell who brings together the top security solutions, disaster recovery and computer hardware solutions is a huge benefit for our IT consulting business here in Winnipeg,” said Roger Miranda of Winnipeg-based Evident IT.

Evident is like many IT services firms across the country who continue to build consulting practices and use Dell as their main solution to meet their clients’ needs.

“Dell is just super easy to deal with and offers Evident IT everything with one easy phone call.” Miranda said.

Even on the other side of globe, Dell partners are winning their share of opportunities.

“Dell’s channel program has provided us with the ability to not only compete but to win by providing both us and our clients [with] real world solutions,” said Adam Rippson, principal consultant at Australia-based Sydney Technology Solutions.  “The support of our channel account team has been top notch.”

PartnerDirect members are winning their share of opportunities in the market both here in Canada and globally.

Dell World continues in Austin, Texas through Thursday.