The newly created $74-billion technology behemoth Dell-EMC has sought to assuage concerns amongst its combined channel partner community by suggesting that it was not looking to recruit new partners in order to be in sync with the company’s enhanced product and services portfolio.
Check out the announcements made at the Dell-EMC summit in Austin, Texas
Though the company would be adding to its channel partner base to tackle the new challenges, the company seems to have backed its existing partners across the world by suggesting that strategically the company would prefer strengthening its position with current partners.
It may be recalled that partners had appreciated the renewed focus on channels by the top brass of the new company, they had expressed apprehensions about the road ahead, stating that they would prefer to wait till for the actual implementation of the program before airing their views (The Full Story).
The latest response from Dell-EMC comes from Cheryl Cook, Vice President of Global Channel Marketing, who suggested that the enterprise would not be looking for ‘a pile of new partners’, but would rather strengthen its position with the current ones.
A report quoting Cook published in Channelnomics (Full Story) said the company would love for as many partners as possible when it is synergistic with their business models to embrace the breadth of the portfolio.
“We think that partners… designing and developing solutions around the breadth of our portfolio and selling to multiple lines of business is really where the trend is headed,” she was quoted as saying.
The confusion amongst channel partners was a result of slightly diverse messaging from Global Channels President John Byrne and Michael Dell. While Byrne held that channels must ‘sell all of it’, Dell countered it claiming that partners ‘don’t have to sell everything.’ (Full Story)
What Cook seems to be suggesting now is that partners are free to take up technologies that are most relevant to their business models. “We have really large broad-line partners who may embrace end-to-end and sell the entire breadth of our portfolio, but we also have security-only partners and storage-only partners,” she was quoted as saying.
The official further clarified that once Dell-EMC launches its branding and framework of the program, there would be better clarity for channel partners instead of merely considering options and alternatives at this point in time. “My role, in my new role is going to be focused on clear, often communication to the partner community around the program, not just campaigns and launches,” she concluded.
Channel Times had earlier reported that partners in India have been largely optimistic about the Dell, EMC collaboration and say that the both the vendors will complement each others offerings in the storage and server space and give strong competition to other vendors, especially, HP and IBM.
They were also are happy with the new DR policies and say that it would speed up the DR process and create more coordination among partners and Dell team. With lots of expectations, partners are now eagerly waiting for the rolling out of the program in the country.