The company’s channel leadership is emphasizing that the changes this year are all about simplifying and improving the partner experience.
Today, Dell Technologies is kicking off their new fiscal year for their partners with enhancements to the 2021 Partner Program. The emphasis throughout is providing greater simplicity, making it easier to work with Dell around different parts of a partner’s business, and throughout the Dell Technologies ecosystem.
“We made these investments to modernize for partners in a year of uncertainty, to provide more flexibility and scalability,” said Cheryl Cook, SVP, Global Partner Marketing, at Dell Technologies.
The changes really fall into three buckets. First, to drive more new business, Dell is simplifying their New Business Incentive to encourage winning new buyers by selling across the portfolio. This will mean greater rewards for upselling and cross selling, expansion to include VxRail, and collaboration with the PowerUp program initiated last year around Dell’s growing number of ‘Power’ brands.
“Partners will be met with a very integrated Go-to-Market with our salesforce, so they are highly aligned with Dell sellers,” Cook said. It’s expected to translate into both an increased addressable market, with a better chance of landing deals.
Secondly, Dell Titanium & Platinum partners will now have the option of transacting their VMware licensing directly through the Dell Technologies Partner Program with an aligned base rebate. To qualify, they must be enrolled in VMware Partner Connect and have a direct purchasing contract with Dell.
“Feedback from partners led to extending the opportunity for VMware to Platinum and Titanium partners,” Cook stated.
This greater ease of access will be extended later this year with Project APEX, Dell’s comprehensive as-a-service strategy which was announced last fall at Dell Technologies World.
“We know that will add tremendous value, and will be a multi-year journey,” Cook said. Storage-as-a-service was announced in October as the first service, and will roll out initially in North America. She indicated that active work is under way now with many partners on private previews.
“The pandemic has forced an unprecedented pace of change, which has forced businesses to respond quicker,” said Denise Millard, SVP, Global Alliances, whose team manages larger strategic outsourcers, integrators, and next generation cloud service providers. “APEX will ease that ability to free up cash to invest. That’s super positive for the partner community. It also enables standing up environments at rapid scale. We also see more alignment, with partners coming together. Not all partners have the ability to build out subject matter expertise, so we see them partnering in the field at a more rapid rate to build things out at scale. They need to be able to respond at the same pace as the hyperscalers. APEX and subscriptions give us that advantage.”
The third element is a more streamlined and personalized end-to-end experience, and revolved around a newly launched Incentives Center which gives partners a comprehensive view of all their program incentives around rebates, rewards and MDF in one place, which was not the case before.
“It’s all about the partner experience,” said Rola Dagher, Dell Technologies’ Global Channel Chief. She emphasized that the new Incentive Center will also contain a new online solutions configurator.
“It will deliver greater pricing transparency on registered deals,” Dagher said. “Partners have been asking for that for a long time.”
Other changes include extending the subscription referral fee paid for selling Dell Technologies Cloud Platform subscriptions to several countries in Europe.
Dagher also announced Dell’s new Partner Program promise – Together, We Stop at Nothing.
“Our new promise statement for partners is to let them know that Dell Technologies will also be there with them,” she emphasized.
