Dell’s North American head Bill Rodrigues laid out Dell’s plans for growth to partners at Dell’s PartnerDirect Summit at Dell World.
Bill Rodrigues, President of North America Commercial and Global Sales at Dell
AUSTIN – Today at the Dell PartnerDirect Summit at Dell World 2015, the company laid out a forceful agenda for expansion in the North American market. And while there were no surprises in the strategy, the importance attached to growth in this market in the upcoming year was stressed.
‘These are the same priorities as in Fiscal Year 2016,” Bill Rodrigues, President of North America Commercial and Global Sales at Dell, told the assembled partners. “In North America, we are growing, and we are winning, and you are all a major part of that. We know that we in North America are a major part of the financial success of this company. If we don’t do well in North America, the company doesn’t do well. There is more pressure to make sure we do well.”
Rodrigues then outlined Dell’s priorities for North America as it heads into fiscal year 2017. They begin with enhancing their position in the core desktop and notebook markets.
“There has been a lot of speculation that we are getting out of the client business but that is not the case,” said Jim DeFoe, VP of North American Channel Sales at Dell.
Rodrigues said that Dell’s goal for the year here is to grow with the market in desktops, where they are the market leader, and outpace it in notebooks.
“We don’t have the lead share in notebooks,” Rodrigues said. “HP does. I don’t like that, and we are going to do something about that. We are going to have the same position in laptops that we do in desktops. We will not stop until we accomplish that, and then we will put distance between us and the number two.”
In enterprise solutions, the objective is to gain share in mainstream servers.
“We want to maintain our lead position in mainstream servers,” Rodrigues said. “That’s a three billion dollar TAM. We are the share leader in two socket rack, but HP is right behind us, so we want to continue to grow that. In two socket blade, HP and Cisco are in the lead, but every quarter we gain a little more.”
Rodrigues said their internal numbers show momentum here.
“In Q3, we will have gained significant share in mainstream servers in North America, and we have many of you to thank for that,” he said. “In Q4 we expect to do the same, so that by the end of the year, our gains in North America should be pretty significant.”
Rodrigues also indicated that Dell is looking to improve the trajectory of both storage and networking, and to increase their channel business, growing acquisitions, increasing training and certifications, strengthening operations processes, and maximizing partner profitability.
“In software, we just want to continue to grow with the market there,” he said.
Rodigues said that a major change in Dell’s go-to-market orientation in North America, which they have already begun to implement, is underway.
“We are making the making the segment orientation geographic, because we had people spending more windshield time travelling to customers than actually sitting in front of our customers,” he said. “We wanted to limit driving time and have more customer face time.”
Under the new system, while Canada remains separate and continues to be run by Kevin Peesker, the U.S. is now divided into East, West and Central regions. Former channel chief Greg Davis runs the East, John Millen the Central, and Dave Trotter, who formerly ran Dell Global is now West.
“This is all about winning,” Rodrigues said. “We want to win.”
