In November 2020, Dell Technologies launched their PowerStore initiative that aimed to provide partners with 20 points in combined front-end discounts and back-end incentives. Now, dell is increasing discounts and expanding the initiative to include the PowerScale family, including Isilon.
Under this expanded initiative, partners selling eligible PowerStore or PowerScale products with approved deal registration will get an increased front-end discount on those products, aimed at providing an average 20 points in addition to standard eligible storage and acquisition back-end rebates. Partners are free to set their own resell pricing and actual margin may vary by transaction, region, partners’ own resell price and other factors.
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“I think channel partners will have a huge opportunity to play here to support customers as they adopt a multi-cloud strategy.”
Tian Beng Ng,
Senior Vice President & General Manager – Channels,
APJ, Dell Technologies
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This expanded initiative is effective immediately, and demonstrates the continued focus on storage that we spoke about in February when we launched the 2021 Dell Technologies Partner Program. At that time, we announced continued investment in New Business, Competitive Swap and Tech refresh rebates, as well as continued unit incentives to support midrange selling momentum, given the significant market opportunity in that area.
Tian Beng Ng, Senior Vice President & General Manager – Channels, APJ at Dell Technologies, said, “2020 has been a very good year for the tech industry. I am happy to say that we had very strong FY-21 results at Dell as the full year revenue was 94.2 billion, which is up by 2% YoY. And if you look at our Q4 revenue, it was 26.1 billion, actually up 9% YoY. But we really had record performance in many areas. Operating incomes was a new record effort by 1 billion. Cash flow was very strong at 11.4 billion for the full year. In fact, if you look at our partner business, we delivered $52 billion through our partners globally in orders. So you can imagine just by the business by itself, 52 billion is very significant.
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“We ended up the year with phenomenal performance. We couldn’t have expected better.”
Anil Sethi,
Vice President & General Manager, Channels,
Dell Technologies, India
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As per him Dell Client Solution Business did really well. The company had 7% compounded annual growth in the last 5 years. It ships 50.3 million PC units which was up 8% YoY. 50.3 million units just last year and then on the server side it gained 240 basis points. He admitted that Dell is No. 1 now on the mainstream server revenue for the last 3 years.
Tian Beng expressed his wish by saying, “We are also pleased to say that globally our strategy is to be No. 1 in many areas all in one place. So, if you look at the industry, in Channel, we continue to specialise around specific industries.”
As per him the pandemic has brought a lot of challenges and opportunities. Dell has identified 6 key technologies including cloud, Edge, AI, Machine Learning, 5G, Data Management and Security which are really important for digital transformation.
Tian Beng added, “If you look at the partner landscape and the trends, I think the first big one we’re seeing is multi-cloud. In fact, we estimate that by 2023 70% of all enterprises will actually be deploying multi-cloud strategies. Multi-cloud means that you’ll be both on-premise and across different public clouds. So with multi-cloud obviously the complexity will increase. I think channel partners will have a huge opportunity to play here to support customers as they adopt a multi-cloud strategy.”
He added, “The Second one is around the Edge. I think Edge computing is really one of the big trends that happening. Edge computing is very important, because it’s so important to bring computing now closer to edge to process the data faster. There’s really not enough time now to wait to move the data all the way from the edge back to the data centre. And then with 5G the bandwidth will increase, so you will see a lot of trends will move to edge. And we believe that nearly 80-100% of edge computing will happen through our channel partners, because to do edge computing you really need very specific types of solutions. And I think our partners are in a best position to actually do that.
For Dell, the next trend is around the whole area of as-a-service and the consumption model. As per Beng all the organisations are looking for very specific business outcomes and partners can take advantage of that.
In fact, Dell has over 2,000 customers already that are currently on the as-a-service or the consumption model. In India Dell recently launched its Flex on Demand. Besides, demand for PC would certainly continue as work from home is again coming to the picture due to the growing case of Covid-19.
This is what at Dell Beng and his team is really focussed on with its channel partners and their 3 tenets of channel vision include trust, growth and change.
Coming to PowerStore, he added that “we are excited about this mid-range product as it offers the largest opportunity. In fact, in APJ, just within this region, mid-range market accounts for 62% of the storage market and it’s about 2.2 billion dollars, just this year. And we are excited because PowerStore, the platform, really addresses a lot of the cloud challenges that I talked about earlier.”
PowerStore is a revolutionary architecture. It really combines the best of the hardware with Apps-on capability. In fact, with this platform, the partners can run the apps directly on the clients, which is really unique. There are actually three big advantages of PowerStore. No. 1 is data centric. So it can really pick on any workload. It’s up to seven times faster, in fact it’s three times more responsive than Dell’s previous mid-range solution. No. 2, it’s actually more intelligent. You can program it and it easily integrates with the VMware kubernetes. No. 3, it’s adaptable. It is really very flexible because of the Apps-on feature. So, with PowerStore customers can really deploy it to meet their cloud strategy and their business needs very well.
On this Dell is giving higher upfront discounting to its partners. Though the company had announced this last year but just last week, the company announced some changes where further the discuouns would be increased.
Last but not the least is the project APEX, which is the new as-a-service initiative.
Anil Sethi, Vice President & General Manager, Channels, Dell Technologies, India, added, “At Dell we live with that culture of optimism. And with that culture, we ended up the year with phenomenal performance. We couldn’t have expected better. It was historic year for us in India, and we haven’t done as well in many past years. Every single LOB showed a huge growth year on year on a quarter basis, and that was phenomenal by any standard. And this all led to the big winning in the market as a company, as a subsidiary. Even as Dell India we did extremely well and it was a historic quarter to Dell India as well.”
He added, “And, that led us to gaining No. 1 positions in multiple things. We have never seen No. 1 in our entire client offering which could be notebooks or workstations or other commercial client solutions. We were #1 in servers, and some of the storage and Hyper Convergent Infrastructure which is HCI. So #1 in client, #1 in servers and #1 in storage. So this has been a historic year in many-many ways where we had a phenomenal year-on-year growths coming up towards the end of the year and leading us and placing us into the leadership position in every single category that we sell.”
Anil describes Dell being number one in many categories as a consolidation of the trust.
Profitability is the center of everything. As per Anil, on PowerStore the company is committing a 20% margin to the partners. Any LOBs which Dell is selling with the partners are focused on their profitability.
Midrange storage is a space where Dell has not gained more share and that is where a new offering called PowerStore is coming up and also there are some other offering like PowerScale.
Anil expanded, “While talking about PowerStore, we feel that in today’s market we are in a data era, Cloud era, you need devices which can talk to each other and being AI enabled, or MI or a 5G enabled. So those are technologies which are going to be super important and that is what you will keep hearing, we are coming up with the products into this category. So that is our priority focus on the midrange storage.”
Finally…
As Dell has identified 6 key technologies including Cloud, Edge, AI, Machine Learning, 5G, Data Management and Security as these are important for digital transformation, it is changing is strategy to adapt to the market and at the same time equipping the partners with right products and channel program.
