Enabling partner transformation

 Charbel Zreiby, Director, Channel Presales, Dell Technologies discusses how Dell Technologies is helping partners evolve

How are the technology shifts impacting the partner ecosystem? What is your message to them?

Our channel ecosystem is one of our strengths and to capitalize on it we need to make sure that our partners are equipped with the right knowledge of our products & solutions portfolio. For that, we have implemented what we call the “Ready to Sell” enablement framework that empowers our partners with the knowledge, certifications & tools required to achieve different levels of self-sufficiency and specialization around our offerings. This allows our partners to drive opportunities on their own and that’s key to our success in the channel space.

As we step into a future with different technology shifts that will shape the business – such as Multi-Cloud, Edge, AI, Security & others – it is important for our partners to rethink their offerings catalog and build capabilities from the Edge to the Core to the Cloud. This will help them transform the traditional solution provider selling motion into a more advanced use case discussion that can help achieve specific business outcomes and which eventually translates into a technology requirement.  At Dell Technologies we are focusing our R&D around innovations in those tech shifts to help our customers and we will continue to support our partners with both the right offerings & knowledge.

How much change is already happening within the partner ecosystem?

The market trends are changing thus impacting the partner landscape trends. We have started witnessing Solution Providers differentiate themselves with their IP (Intellectual Property) and consultative skills to address customers’ demands to transform and automate their operations. Others are shifting from selling to servicing with a focus on expansion & upsell especially with the As-A-Service model becoming more and more popular. Based on an IDC study, it is projected to reach $133.7B by 2026 at a CAGR of 12.6%.

We are also going to witness evolving partner roles as the whole ecosystem evolves. Projects will become more complex with different specializations required, which could drive multiple partners to collaborate on the same opportunities and this means that the partners and the industry are becoming more interconnected than ever.

How do you see the role of your distributors in your go-to-market strategy?

Our distributors are an integral part of our channel ecosystem. They give us the ability to enhance our coverage through their network of resellers which offers the breadth that we cannot achieve on our own no matter how much we grow our sales teams. We train our distributors to work with their reseller landscape the same way we do with ours and this is the biggest value add they bring by enabling them, delivering demand generation activities, and supporting them in the opportunities they bring.

How are partners differentiating themselves?

Generally, partners differentiate themselves in different aspects such as the portfolio of services they can deliver, their team’s capabilities, after-sales support, etc.  More specifically from a Dell Technologies perspective, we help our partners differentiate in two major areas. First, our partner program allows them to grow in different tiers such as Gold, Platinum & Titanium based on meeting  different requirements including accreditations, certifications and other metrics. Second, through the specialization exercise, which is part of our ‘Ready to Sell’ framework, we help partners become specialized in areas directly specific to our offerings or indirectly, where our offerings complement other 3^rd party solutions that they sell from different ISVs. These various specializations are in place to help partners differentiate themselves and to become specialty partners we take them through a tailor-made cycle of training, certifications & endorsement to ensure they have been able to learn and apply all that’s required to sell, deploy, and deliver support services.