The guiding philosophy of the program remains fixated on the simple, predictable and profitable principles, but quite a few tweaks have been made to the program, many of them significant, and most of which are likely to please partners rather than make them grumble.
At their Global Partner Summit kicking off their Dell Technologies World, Dell EMC delineated their channel strategy for the year ahead, and a lengthy list of program offerings designed to help execute it.
The Dell EMC channel business overall picked up in the second half of the year – always a good sign.
The beginning of the new Dell EMC fiscal year in February is always the time for the most significant changes to their partner program, although the company acknowledged the changes this year are more about fine-tuning.
Dell EMC is also planning some additional initiatives for later in the new fiscal year around solutions-based competencies.
Out of the gate, Titanium Black and Titanium will be able to buy the VMware offerings for their solutions straight from Dell EMC, which will allow them to get full credit under VMware’s partner program for their purchases.
In addition to the many storage announcements, Dell EMC also addressed the issues with the Partner Academy, and will be waiving training requirements for the second half of the year.
The Dell EMC channels team was extremely happy with the results of the first quarter of its new unified partner program.
Partner presence at this year’s event increased massively over anything at either the Dell or EMC events, or the initial joint event in Austin last fall.
Dell EMC fills in the remaining blanks in what its new unified partner program, which formally rolls out today, will look like.
The process by which Dell and EMC members will map to tiers in the new program has been laid out, as has the way that EMC partners’ month of January will be handled until the end of the Dell fiscal year.
Dell’s channel business did very well in the first quarter of their new year. At this stage though, there is still no definite clarity on the channel implications of assets entering Dell – and exiting it, with the SonicWALL divestiture.
Dell Channel Chief Cheryl Cook provides some suggestions how partners can help ensure that their customer cloud deployments are successful.
Some new incent programs have gone live, and other partner offerings announced at Dell World last October are now available.
Dell’s global channel chief lays out her suggestions on how to best mentor younger female employees.
Only a few parts of what’s coming to the channel from Dell was announced at Dell World, but broad sneak peeks were offered about several changes that will roll out at some point in the next fiscal year.
Dell’s overhaul of its segmented deployment services into a united ProDeploy offering takes the same step they did in support with ProSupport, and has some attractive new elements for channel partners.
Dell channel chief Cheryl Cook also provides a broad update on issues of specific interest to the Dell SonicWALL channel.
Dell’s channel chief offers some suggestions how companies can effectively build or improve their channel programs.
Dell indicated good progress on their green fields discount initiative, overall commercial business, and partner education efforts. While the number of partners using Dell financing jumped considerably in Q1, the company wants more participation there. Plus, still no firm date on when Dell will team up with SYNNEX in Canada.
