Partner community unfazed by Dell’s return to the public market

It’s business as usual for Dell EMC’s partner community, according to the company’s director of channel sales Deanna Thomson, following Dell Technologies’ return to the public market this week.

“In general, I’ve had no inquiries from the partner community and for us, it’s business as usual,” she told CDN.

On Monday the enterprise technology vendor and PC maker announced that it’s returning to the public market, buying out its virtualization subsidiary VMware stock through a cash and share-swap deal. This means that VMware will remain a publicly traded, independent company, in which Dell has a controlling state.

According to an investor relations report from Dell Technologies, this was the final step in the company’s strategy to become a leading global end-to-end technology infrastructure provider. Dell exited the public markets in 2013 to rethink its strategy moving forward.

“There was uncertainty regarding the trajectory and sustainability of the PC market. Dell also had limited presence across certain IT infrastructure segments and a weak position in cloud computing,” the report says. “Dell exited the public markets in 2013 to undergo a significant transformation, which would have been difficult to achieve under the watch of a public market focused on quarter-to-quarter earnings.”

Deanna Thomson, director of channel sales for Dell EMC

The strategy appears to be working. Dell captured nearly 22 per cent of the worldwide storage arena, increased its lead over Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and for the first time since closing the EMC merger experienced its first gain in storage sales, by 5.8 per cent during the first quarter of 2018.

“We had a stellar quarter overall across all of our lines of business,” says Thomson, not citing specific figures for Canada. “We haven’t really changed our strategy. We’re really asking partners to focus and to declare. We want to understand where they are leading with Dell EMC so that we are focusing all of our energy around certification enablement and alignment to our segment teams around that core capability. To the degree that our partners are doing that, we’re honing in on those partners because we don’t believe being agnostic is a go-to-market strategy that works for Dell EMC.”

Thomson points to a Canadian partner that’s developed a core competency around application development through Pivotal Cloud Foundry, an open source, multi-cloud application platform born out of EMC and VMware.

“On top of that, they have a very well developed go-to-market around IT transformation which is modernizing, automating and transforming the IT centre. Those two strategies align perfectly with Dell’s digital and IT transformation strategies,” says Thomson, suggesting more and more partners are similarly insync with Dell around those strategies.

Channel-specific programs, such as the recently launched the Dell EMC Ready Stack program, announced at the Global Partner Summit late April, will also have a significant impact in the next several years, and is already getting positive feedback from the partner community, she adds.

“We’re on an incredible trajectory, and our overall strategy is working – simple, predictable and profitable.”

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Alex Coop
Alex Coophttp://www.itwc.ca
Former Editorial Director for IT World Canada and its sister publications.

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