Rola Dagher, a Canadian who came to the Dell channel job from running Cisco Canada, also singled out the Canadian channel for its recent work.

Dell Technologies met with partners face to face again at a live Dell Technologies World for the first time in three years, and the core message was one of reaffirmation of partners’ value for their strong performance over the last year in less than ideal circumstances.

“We are so grateful to you all because you put your trust in us,” Global Channel Chief Dagher told partners. “We are grateful for your loyalty, for your business, and most importantly, for helping is to become the business you want to partner with. Together we bring strength. We create greatness. We bring value to our customers. We help solve the world’s most challenging problems.”

Dagher said that the last five years have been transformational, and that some of Dell’s competitors dealt with the challenging situation by going small.

“We went really big,” she stated. “Together, we put in the work that led to success. In five years, we bult one of the biggest and most lucrative partner programs, that saw our channel business go from $38 billion in 2017 to $59 billion now. We are bigger than Adidas or Nike, and we are at a critical point in the industry which will define our future.”

Dell has placed a new emphasis on bringing validated solutions to customers, with the new Dell Validated Design for Retail Edge that was announced two weeks ago being an example.

“These validated solutions lead to life-changing transformations that our technologies can provide,” Dagher said. “The real enabler of all these transformations is all of you. It’s clear the market is coming our way. We are in a strong position to go out and cater to the $1.3 trillion of opportunities. We have moved from transactional to transformation businesses and approaches, and we are asking you today to go all in with us.”

Dagher also told ChannelBuzz that the Canadian channel had really picked it up over the last couple of years.

“The results on the channel side have been amazing, especially the last two years,” she said. “Every line of business at Dell has grown at a greater pace than direct during this time.”

Canada has not been a frontrunner historically in adopting new technology, and Dagher said that it would be misleading to describe the changes there as a quantum leap, but she indicated that they were perceptible.

“There has always been a little bit of delay in adoption when it comes to adoption, and Canada has been behind a bit when it comes to technology overall, she pointed out. “However, Toronto is now ranking third as a technology hub. Our partners are also doing the right thing with executing. Great partners help us deliver our APEX as-a-Service offerings, and Canada was one of the first countries in which we introduced APEX.”

Dagher said that the channel component of the APEX business is showing some momentum.

“We launched APEX last year, and the focus is how we continue to modernize the way we deliver solutions,” she stated. “We have been focused on that value proposition. We went for quality, not for speed, but we are still in over 40 countries with it. Partners layer their service on top of our service.

Dagher said that while in the U.S., there are a fair number of VARs who specialize in bringing bleeding edge technology to customers, the numbers in Canada are proportionally less, but they do exist and Dell works with some.

“There are not as many in the Canadian market, but a few of them are quite strong, and we have seen them grow and step up,” she indicated.

“Canada has a tight tech community, and we have seen partners who stepped up in the pandemic,” she said. “Canada has been pretty much a mirror of the U.S. in that respect, across the board. We are also driving growth on expanded solutions, and doubling up on programs we had little competitive swap. We are also emphasizing social impact issues like ESG [Enterprise, Social, Government] and launching new MDF for giving back to the community through asset recovery.”