Dell moved 10k partners to distribution-led buying – and says they’re growing faster for it

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.

We’re continuing our coverage from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas this week, and I wanted to close the series of Dell execs with a conversation that I think will resonate with pretty much anyone who moves Dell product – which, let’s be honest, is a lot of you. Distribution is one of the topics that often gets taken for granted. It’s the plumbing, it’s the logistics, it’s the credit line. Except that’s not really what distribution is anymore, and Anthony Tanoury has about as good a vantage point as anyone to explain why.

He spent 30 years in the industry on both the vendor and distributor side of the table, and he’s now Dell’s senior director of distribution, which means he’s the person responsible for making the relationship between Dell and its distributor partners actually work at scale. This week at DTW, Dell announced some significant changes to how it’s thinking about its partner ecosystem, and distribution’s right at the center of that.

We talked about the evolution of distribution from warehouse and financing shop to AI enablement engine, what it actually means for partners that Dell moved 10,000 of them to distribution-led buying last year, and what the promise of deal registration in hours rather than days actually requires to make real.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Anthony Tanoury.

Anthony, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.Anthony Tanoury: Thanks for having me.

Robert Dutt: To kick things off – the definition of distribution, and the definition from distributors themselves of what they do, has changed so dramatically over the last few years, as you’ve been party to on both sides of the fence, vendor and distributor, with your background. Sitting where you are now as senior director of distribution, how do you define the core value proposition for your distribution partners today compared to the way it may have looked a few years ago if you were in the seat, or in a previous seat managing distribution?

Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, I think 30 years in distribution – dating myself here. The idea of a distributor was warehousing, finance, so on. Really, the way that that’s evolved – and still evolving, because not everyone fully understands distribution and the value of distribution – but it’s really become the engine for all of us OEMs to really dive deep into the mid-market, and as lead generation for all of us. So SMB, mid-market, and then really leveraging their enablement platforms for our partners. So as an example, this week here at Dell Technologies World, we’ve launched our full AI portfolio. And really at the end of the day, it’s a platform to build off of. And our distributors, through our partners, are really enabling those partners – especially in the mid-market. The enterprise partners have hired data scientists and so on. And those mid-market and SMB partners, they need our help. And we really rely on our distributors, who have AI accelerator programs and can really take a partner through the journey of how to look at AI, how to start, and then how to implement and really get started in this space. We’ve met with multiple partners at this show and we’ve had our partner advisory boards. And that’s the number one takeaway when we’re talking to our partners: “How do I get started?” And I think Jeff Clarke and Michael Dell talked about that on stage – it’s really, we’ve got the platform to build off of, and then really rely on our distributors to go enable all of our partners out there to have those conversations, and then to build the proof, the POCs for us with their customers and take it to the next step.

Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about this moment in time and managing distribution right now. Whenever I think of running a hardware vendor, running distribution, or being on the purchasing side of the solution provider right now – boy, that’s an interesting challenge – with the supply chain issue, with the pricing issue, with all of that. I guess it boils down to, from your perspective: how are you leaning on distribution differently to help you guys and your partners ultimately, especially the smaller ones, handle this issue of availability, of supply chain, of capacity, as we’ve seen the component price challenges across the industry?

Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so that’s not unique to Dell. We’re all challenged with the supply chain challenges, and it’s really about having a consistent message to our partner community, to our customers, on how – or why – to partner with Dell in these times. And our distributors have really leaned in with us right now and are getting that message out to our partners that “Dell’s got a plan. Here’s the plan.” And this is how we want you to message that and relay that to your partner community. So as an example, I did a keynote speech at one of our large partner events recently, and my talk track was based on how to navigate those supply challenges with us. I spent a lot of time on that, and had multiple partners come up afterwards, catching me outside. And the comment was, “That’s what we need to hear. That’s our challenge today, and you’re tackling that head on.” So to get back to your question from a distribution perspective – they enabled me to take that message to them, and then they’re expanding on that to their 20,000 partners in their ecosystem.

Robert Dutt: As you bring up an interesting thread there – I don’t have time obviously to go through the whole keynote, but the elevator pitch, boiled-down version of it – what’s the advice to partners on tackling it from where you sit and from where Dell sits?

Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, really leaning in with us and going deeper with your customers. And so that’s where you’re going to work with Dell and get priority allocation – looking long-term versus short-term, “I just need this product in the next week to get through this phase.” Now, let’s look at a long-term solution together and let’s plan two years out. Let’s plan longer in some cases, and then we’ll take it from there.

Robert Dutt: And that’s something we heard also from Jeff Clarke in Q&A – that idea of build out those long-term plans, put your hand up as early as you can. Because it sounds like if you’ve got your hand up early, you’ve obviously got the best chance of getting that list fulfilled.

Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, whether it’s a customer or a partner – I mean, that’s a true partnership and we’ll lean in when customers want to lean in with Dell.

Robert Dutt: I wanted to touch on the changes that are coming to the partner program, specifically as it involves your interactions with distribution. The Dell portal is getting redone and the Dell program is getting redone with the modern partner platform rolling out this year. You guys are baking agentic AI into your partner platform. Meanwhile, your distributors are doing the same thing with their partner platforms. I’m curious – obviously very early in the game – but how are you and your distribution partners thinking long-term about how those various platforms interact with each other, in terms of delineating who covers what base, when it comes to serving the partner and what you may be able to do down the road as a result of having those platforms?

Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so the key is cutting down on SLAs. How do we take getting pricing out to a partner, out to a customer, from two to three days down to a matter of hours, right? And we’ve worked closely with all of our distributors over the last year or two, because our partners rely on our distributors’ platforms. And how does that integrate with ours? But the key is speed. How do we do things faster? And that is, as you stated, embedding AI into that. And so again, can’t get too far ahead, because we’re still going down this path and things sometimes get pushed out. But we’ve been working on this for a long time with them. We’ve had a lot of meetings with them here. We’ve gone deep into their platforms. They’re all rolling out new platforms as well. So making sure we’re doing it all at the same time, and together, has been key.

Robert Dutt: One area I did want to double-click on there. One of the big promises of the new platform is deal-reg approval in minutes, AI-generated demand signals, those kinds of things. As Dell is accelerating its own systems, how does distribution plug into that? How does the distributor help manage and act on those AI-driven demand signals and facilitate a faster quote-to-deal-reg?

Anthony Tanoury: Without getting too deep into deal-reg, there are a lot of nuances there. But yes, today where you’ve got multiple partners of record and you’ve got multiple partner IDs – simplifying that down to one or two partner IDs versus 20 today that we have – and then with deal registration, having partner of record is key in that mix, and we do have that today. But the distributors are really where it starts. So a partner comes to the distributor, says, “Hey, I need pricing on this and I want deal registration.” Today it might take the full SLA – the two to three days we just talked about – to get deal registration approved, with multiple systems flowing back and forth. In the future – and when I say future, we’re close, we’ll get there – is having that one stream go, starting from the distributor, through AI, plays into that, where it’ll do the work of looking in and making sure: here’s the partner of record. Is there a partner on record? Does the end user qualify? And without multiple people, multiple email streams going back and forth, it locks it in. And so now you’ve got an answer back in two to three hours versus two to three days.

Robert Dutt: A lot of MSPs prefer to consume technology as a service, because it’s kind of in what they do – the name’s kind of on the tin – and bundle that with vendors like Microsoft or security or what have you. How are you working with distributors to make APEX and infrastructure solutions seamlessly consumable within distribution, and particularly on their marketplace?

Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so that’s a good question. So there’s APEX, right? We have Dell APEX, and our competitors have their own, but we have Dell APEX. But our distributors also have their own versions of APEX, or as-a-service models. And at the end of the day, we leverage theirs just as well as we do our own. And it depends on the customer, depends on the contract situation, but there are multiple vehicles to get an as-a-service deal done today that didn’t exist a year ago, didn’t exist two years ago, right? And then there’s – moving to another topic, and really the same topic – device as a service, right? And that was something we’ve been talking about for a few years now and hasn’t really taken off, but that’s all part of this now. Because the device at the edge is co-mingled now – especially in the new AI world – with your server infrastructure. So it could all become part of a recurring revenue stream for MSPs.

Robert Dutt: And I think it makes potentially hardware more compelling to the MSP. When you’ve gotten that tie-in – I know it’s early days and it’s a way off from being fully operationalized – but what you’re talking about, and what Jeff Clarke was talking about today about basically acting as the arbiter, sort of an open orchestration layer, saying “all right, this particular bit is best handled in the infrastructure and the data center, this particular bit is best handled right here on the machine sitting by the desk side.”

Anthony Tanoury: Absolutely.

Robert Dutt: We’ve heard a lot this week about the focused accounts incentive, rewarding partners for selling across lines of business. And it’s kind of a cliche almost, in that vendors such as yourselves who have multiple lines of business are always looking for great ways to get partners to sell across those businesses. And certainly incentives are a classic way of doing that. How are you using distribution to train, enable, and facilitate partners making that leap across the portfolio – especially as this seems to be something that Denise Millard and the team are putting a lot of the wood behind?

Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so you mentioned the partner program – and that’s really what we leverage with the push coming from distribution. You typically focus where you can earn the most dollars. And so we’re putting the dollars on driving all lines of business for us. So today you may have a lot of infrastructure-focused partners – like MSPs, they don’t want to sell the client the edge device. But again, with AI driving from both ends now, it’s become an imperative that they don’t ignore the edge devices anymore. So really leveraging distribution both ways. We’ve got CSG partners that don’t sell storage and infrastructure, and then we’ve got partners that are trying to move in that direction. And then we’ve got other partners saying, “Hey, I’ve got to get on board too,” that are in the infrastructure space and have got to move in the other direction. And that’s where we leverage distribution – they have multiple enablement engines, all of our distributors, to enable those partners to do that. So for us – and again, to the partner program – we’ve announced some changes here at this event, with our partner advisory board meeting coming up. Partner programs, you want to keep them simple, predictable for partners, with tweaks along the way. And AI is one of those tweaks where we’ve got to pull the levers in different directions to get partners and distributors moving in that motion. So yeah, it’s an exciting time to be at Dell with this opportunity in front of us.

Robert Dutt: That’s a big tweak – or more accurately, a big series, whole family, whole universe of tweaks to be made. But you don’t want to pull a whole program apart. You’ve got partners that have invested and distributors that have invested in that program. So you’ve got to make sure you do those incremental tweaks when you need them, but not blow up the whole program.

Anthony Tanoury: Absolutely.

Robert Dutt: You mentioned off the top the classic framing of distribution as the warehouse and the bank kind of structure. Let’s touch on the bank side of things a little bit there. In light of everything that’s going on today, in light of the infrastructure refresh opportunity that’s out there, the constraints in the marketplace – financial engineering is probably more critical than ever. Dell Financial Services is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but how do you view the role of the distributor when it comes to PO financing, terms, bridging the financing gap for complex projects, and helping partners manage this whole multiple-balls-in-the-air situation?

Anthony Tanoury: You can’t look at a partner just through the lens of what they do with Dell. The business they have with Dell – partners procure from many places. We love them to only sell Dell for us, but they have other options, other solutions, other areas of the business that we’re not focused on. They procure through distribution. Distributors have huge businesses with a lot of these partners. They have financial terms through the distributors that maybe we can’t offer them through Dell – and leveraging our partner programs to deliver extended terms in this environment. With the supply shortages and lead times getting pushed out, really leveraging distribution with terms that we can’t give them today. There are multiple levels, and they have much higher credit lines with the distributors than maybe we have with them. And then going back to the as-a-service model – really leveraging distributors who have all those options in place for them today, that maybe they don’t have with us.

Robert Dutt: When you’re looking at distribution, what’s the one metric you look at first to judge whether a distributor is meeting the bar – is delivering net new value to Dell?

Anthony Tanoury: New partner recruitment, right? Multiple lines of business – not just focused in one area of our business, but selling across all lines of business. Then we rely on distribution. We just moved 10,000 partners last year over to distribution-led. Where those partners could procure direct from Dell in the past, now they can’t, and they buy strictly through distribution. Those are our authorized partner community – and potentially in the future, expanding that to other levels of our business and offloading them to distribution. Dell is a more channel- and distribution-friendly company than we get credit for. I think that doesn’t always get seen, and we’re moving that way.

Robert Dutt: How did that process go, and any learnings from moving those 10,000 partners that may inform what you do in moving the next group, if there is a next group to be moved?

Anthony Tanoury: Exactly, a lot. A lot of that is in data transfer and making sure that the distributors have the right data to target those partners and give those partners the service they need. The distributors all had to ramp up their infrastructure to support those partners – credit line facilities with those partners – because they didn’t do business with those partners before. Onboarding some of those partners as net new to distribution, who had never bought from distribution before. And then again, really letting those partners know the value of distribution. Since we’ve moved those partners over, those partners that have embraced distribution are growing faster than the partners that haven‘t. It’s sometimes a lot easier to get that additional support, that additional attention from a disti, than it is to try to navigate that directly. In some cases, they can support them better than we can, and it’s proven out in the last year.

Robert Dutt: What’s the single most underutilized resource that you guys have through distribution, in terms of what partners are using?

Anthony Tanoury: I would say the AI accelerator programs I spoke about earlier. That’s key. Going back to the enablement piece – I just don’t think a lot of partners understand the value. They come to these events, they make the statements, “Hey, we need help here. We need to leverage distribution for that help.” Especially when you come to a Dell Technologies World, or you go to one of our competitors’ or peers’ events. Our distributors have that enablement piece for you to get started, that you need to leverage, because it’s not just a point-solution type of conversation, it’s broad. Really leveraging them to help.

Robert Dutt: Along the same lines, but a little bit different – obviously we’ve touched on the idea of cross-selling, and the idea that, surprise surprise, Dell would like partners to sell more of the portfolio, better together, all that kind of stuff. For an MSP or VAR whose primary look at Dell to date has been selling end devices – laptops, desktops, et cetera – sourced through distribution, what do you see as the most likely next logical step to expand that relationship? To get thinking across lines? What are some of the common threads for the best ways to approach that?

Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, that’s a tough question. Common ways to approach how to sell across lines of business – take it back to the customer level. Your customer is buying these products, and they may be buying them from somebody else or they may be buying them online, depending on the size of the organization, so on. Again, the service model – going back to it, it’s another service revenue stream that they can leverage. But I think when you look at the distributors, they have a lot of talk tracks with the partners on how to do that, and frankly do it better than we do. So that’s why we really leverage them. When we say, “Hey, we want to sell more of our client and peripheral devices,” we start with distribution. We start with the partner community, and it’s paid off. I think it’s just – really, don’t leave revenue on the table. We’ve been saying it for years and I think it’s starting to resonate, and leveraging distribution to push that message forward. And I think partners are starting to catch on.

Robert Dutt: All right, great insights. Anthony, I thank you for taking the time. I’m sure it’s been a busy week for you here. Thanks for joining us.

Anthony Tanoury: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Robert Dutt: There you have it, Anthony Tanoury from Dell Technologies.

I’d like to thank Anthony for carving out some time in what I’m sure was a very busy week on the show floor here at DTW.

Few things from the conversation that I thought were worth pulling out.

First, the 10,000 partners that Dell moved to distribution-led buying last year – that’s not a small number, and the fact that those partners are outgrowing the ones who haven’t yet made that transition should be a data point for anyone still on the fence about how they structure their Dell relationship.

Second, when Anthony named net new partner recruitment as his primary metric for judging distributor performance – not revenue, not attach rate, net new – that tells you something about where Dell thinks its distribution channel still has room to grow.

And third, if you haven’t looked at the AI accelerator programs your distributor is running, that came up twice as the single most underutilized resource available to partners right now. Probably worth a phone call. I’d like to thank you as always for listening to the show.

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Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.