Dell has announced the addition of systems Integrators to the Dell Internet of Things (IoT) Solutions Partner Program. This planned expansion follows the program’s establishment in April, when the partners were originally limited to ISVs.

“This is the second wave – the solution providers part of the program,” said Al Zelasko, Director Global Channel Manager IoT and Embedded Computing at Dell. “This is specifically focused on the deployment partners who can do the last mile in the solution.”

The ISV component, which included 25 partners at the April launch, has more than doubled since then. The role of the new SI partners will be to complement the ISVs.

“The IOT partner program is an umbrella, with ISVs and Sis,” Zelasko said. “A repository of all the information is housed in one database within Dell. It will allow both external customers and our internal sales team to find ISVs and integrators with the appropriate experience. It will lead to some really good matchmaking. We are trying to encourage collaboration, bringing our top tier partners together.”

Zelasko is new to Dell, and his experience is in the industrial distribution space.

“My role is go out globally and put together an infrastructure of partners with the ISVs that Jason Shepherd [Dell’s Director of IoT Strategy and Partnerships] is curating,” he said. “It will run from global SIs down to focused niche use case solution providers in areas like automation.”

The SIs Dell has publicly named to date, which include Action Point, Datatrend Technologies, L&T Technology Services, Mobiliya, and Tridium, a division of Honeywell, go well beyond the big names in the system integrator community.

“The program has three tiers – Premier, Preferred and Registered levels,” Zelasko said. “The top two tiers are a select few partners that we align with. That’s in the tens if not less. The Registered level broadens out pretty wide, however. We won’t be as linked together with co-selling but if they fit the verticals and use cases, we will work with them. We expect to be dealing with many smaller regional entities.”

Zelasko said the new and expanding nature of the IoT market warrants this investment in more focused small players.

“We want to encourage smaller partners, because it’s such a fragmented market,” he said. “It is hard to see who will be a big player down the road.”

Partners who join the Dell IoT Solutions Partner Program will benefit from increased market awareness through Dell. They will also have accessed to Dell’s IoT product portfolio, including purpose-built, intelligent edge gateways and embedded PCs, security and manageability tools, data centre and cloud infrastructure.

“Prospective partners can come onto our landing page, and see if they fit, and if they do, enter into Dell’s program,” Zelasko said. “We will give all the parties the opportunity to work together. The broader we can build our ecosystem, the more successful we will be.”