Dell EMC’s quarterly Partner Broadcast was mainly about recounting their many trumps in the first half of the year, but there was some new news here which will interest their channel partners.
The new SAP initiative provides partners with packaged cloud solutions, with the partner adding their own IP. It also contains go-to-market and marketing initiatives to help the partners sell the packages.
Greg Ambulos, who runs North America’s channel business for Dell EMC, was in Toronto today, and provided an update on the new channel program’s progress. He also detailed changes to the overall sales structure designed to deal with long-standing complaints of legacy Dell partners.
Cloud ERP vendor Intacct’s Xtreme Business Building Conference this week had a record number of partners, as the company continues to expand its channel business.
Walter Denk, who has a distribution background and has been working for Avaya in Germany, is the company’s new global channel chief. Even more importantly, he says that the job has been redefined and that the channel will benefit.
At this stage, the new Dell EMC program is still in the formative stages, but the company indicated the general principles. Details will be coming in December, with the launch to take place in February.
Over the last year, NetApp has reshaped its channel strategy extensively, and will soon cap it with a new Hard Deck policy. Unlike a similar named policy of an old competitor, NetApp thinks this one will be highly popular with partners.
The key set of changes to the program sees discounts based on partner tier flattened, and the resources moved to an enhanced deal registration program, to give more rewards to partners who do more work.
The massive pace of technological change is compelling EMC to reassess how it goes to market with its enterprise alliance partners, and while changes to the strategy are very much a work in progress, they are likely to bring significant change to the relationship between the vendor, its alliance partners, and solution providers.
EMC is also announcing several other programmatic moves, including a Federation Ready designation and expanding EMC’s EMC Ready sales transformation initiative to partners. Their EMC True loyalty program pilot is now being publicized and expanded globally.
The new program replaces the legacy one Arcserve brought with it from its days as part of CA, and leverages Ingram Micro’s business intelligence capabilities in several respects.
iboss is well known in the education space, where it has a strong presence, but new SVP of Worldwide Sales Frank McLallen is looking to take advantage of their solutions’ scalability, and expand much more deeply into other markets.
Dell’s top security partners still have concerns and issues about their relationship with Dell, So what is the vendor doing about them?
Canada is one of the countries where Unify pledges to be 100 per cent channel within twelve months – which will mean they will need to get distribution set up here.
Dell’s Project Collaboration, launched in July in servers and storage, was successful, and as a result by the end of October, it will be rolled out broadly across all lines of business.
Fresh off its merger with Enterasys, Extreme Networks says its new partner program reflects the fact that the combined vendor is now a channel company.
Tintri expands its channel program, introduces new mobile app for partners.
Symantec continues to trickle out changes to its channel program, focusing on top partners, specializations and high-touch field engagements.
VMware will roll out a new partner program between now and its Partner Exchange event early next year, introducing four tiers and a simplified approach.
Storage vendor clarifies rules of engagement, opens up services to distributors
