New Delhi, Sept 25: Dell’s Global Commercial Channels is betting high on the capabilities of their resellers / partners to drive the company’s growth in the end-to-end solutions business, a division they created through the acquisition of several global companies.
The Global Commercial Channels (GCC) was formed two years back as part of Dell’s renewed go-to-market channel strategy to increase partner convenience, profitability and growth.
PartnerDirect, a program set up by Dell to provide its partners with strong market differentiation and growth opportunities through various programs, has a hierarchy of certified partners across three levels, viz., Registered Partners, Preferred Partners and Premier Partners. All these are a part of the Premier or Preferred levels, depending on their level of commitment and training.
Piyush Pushkal, Country Lead for Marketing and Programs at Dell’s GCC believes that the company’s transformation into an end-to-end solutions player is well underway, given the impressive products and services portfolio that they’ve put together via the strategic IP acquisitions.
“Rather than locking customers into a single path requiring new hardware, Dell helps customers to deliver results today by working with what they already have (Dell and non-Dell),” he told Channel Times in an exclusive chat.
Currently the group have close to 2000 channel relationships in the Indian market and there are 300 recurring partners every year. At Dell we look at quality more than quantity of partners and year after year the company would invest in the existing partners to improve their skills instead of adding new ones, he said.
Dell has acquired significant new skills and capabilities (19 strategic acquisitions in a little over two years; announcement of eight strategic acquisitions in 2012 – AppsAssure, SonicWALL, Wyse Technology, Clerity Solutions, Make Technologies, Quest Software, Gale Technologies and Credant Technologies). Their latest acquisition is Enstratius.
“Our journey to become an end-to-end service company is an ongoing process, but we are banking on our channels to spread the message across a large base of customers who can showcase a bigger bouquet of our products. We started with a minimum mix, but now it’s a significant sized pie at a global level. GCC is contributing 30-35 percent to Dell’s global revenue with the Indian ops clocking an impressive 50 to 100 per cent growth, Piyush said.
Some of its commercial partners in India are Athena IT, Dynacon, Locus, Transtek Infoway. Of late the company has started tapping into the Tier-2 cities to push commercial business. Summits held at Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi and Mumbai helped them connect to more than 250 partners in the smaller cities.
Our objective of organizing these partner summits at different regions is to reach a wider audience of our channel partners, and relay the key message of GCC, he said.
Looking at the end to end service portfolio, there are specific products and solutions like Vertex small datacenter in a box, SonicWALL security solution and storage which the company thinks is a best fit for partners. It is also expected that Dell will soon roll out cloud-based solutions as part of GCC for its partners.
On the partner integration program, the Dell official said “We’re planning to complete the channel integration process of non-Dell products and solutions with Dell partners by the end of September. We are also reworking our incentives, reward programs, training, certification and online tools to align with our channel partners,” he said.