Dell Technologies partners tap into cross-selling strategy
Dell Technologies said its channel partners are realizing the benefits of cross-selling from its portfolio of products and strategically aligned businesses; other news from the week.
Dell Technologies partners are continuing to embrace the cross-selling opportunity inherent in a multifaceted product portfolio, according to the vendor.
Since Dell's merger with EMC in 2016, Dell has urged its partners to tap into its combined portfolio, which includes client, storage and server technologies. Partners also have been pointed to the various strategically aligned businesses under the Dell Technologies umbrella, including VMware, Boomi and SecureWorks. Now, as the company's channel business reaches $52 billion in orders, Dell's senior vice president of global partner marketing, Cheryl Cook, said partners clearly realize the value in incorporating complementary Dell products in customer engagements.
"This notion of the breadth of the portfolio and a cross-sell opportunity we feel is really pretty real in the way of opportunity for our partners and differentiation. ... I think the strategy is working [and] the product portfolio is sound." Cook said.
Dell Technologies partners that sell three lines of business generate approximately nine times more revenue than partners selling two lines of business and 31 times the revenue than partners selling a single line of business, Cook said. Partners that sell three lines of business in addition to VMware products generate 103 times more revenue than partners selling three lines of business, she added.
Dell Technologies partner Q3 highlights
Looking back at Dell Technologies' third-quarter earnings, which ended Nov. 1, Cook said the company's overall channel business was up 4%, and, on a year-to-date basis, grew 8%. In terms of Dell's different product categories, partners' client sales increased 8% in the third quarter and 7% year to date, while storage sales rose 4% in Q3 and 11% year to date. Although the server business saw "a slight dip" in growth in Q3, on a year-to-date basis, partners' server sales were up 7%, Cook noted.
Cheryl Cook
"We have ambitious share gain expectations in the business. We know that in some parts of our business we are consolidating. You look at the core client and server business, that may be a consolidating part of the market, but you look at converged infrastructure, multi-cloud [and] storage, there is expansion … and we are in both," Cook said.
Other highlights of the third quarter included the following:
- Dell Technologies partners acquired more than 17,000 net-new customers. On a year-to-date basis, partners have brought in more than 52,000 net-new customers.
- In terms of training and certification, partners earned about 16,000 credentials. Year to date, Dell has delivered almost 62,000 credentials.
- Dell Financial Services originations grew by 22%. The originations include traditional leases, as well as flexible consumption models.
Dell closed 2019 with changes to its executive management structure. Marius Haas, president and chief commercial officer at Dell Technologies, revealed he will be retiring at the end of the vendor's fiscal year, ending Feb. 3. Bill Scannell, president of global enterprise sales and customer operations, added commercial and partner sales to his responsibilities, unifying the enterprise and commercial sales segments under his leadership.
"[Scannell] is an industry veteran with a great reputation and trusted person with the partner community [and] with our customers," Cook said.
Dell also named Jeff Clarke as its COO and vice chairman in December.
Dell is in the final weeks of its fourth quarter and in the process of auditing partners for fiscal year 2021 Dell Technologies Partner Program tier requirements, according to Cook.
Oracle customers move to cloud, eye MSPs
Organizations that use Oracle for core business applications are migrating to the cloud and view managed service providers as a means for getting there.
A survey from Apps Associates, a cloud migration and managed service provider based in Boston, reveals that nearly all of the more than 300 IT decision-makers it polled are in some stage of moving Oracle business applications to the cloud. The individuals surveyed use Oracle as their primary business system and work for companies with revenue in the $100 million to $5 billion range.
According to the survey, 37% of respondents said they have already migrated the Oracle businesses application suite in its entirety to the cloud. Fifty-seven percent said they are in the process of migrating, while 5% said they plan to migrate in the near future. One percent of the respondents had no plans for migrating any component of their technology stack in 2020.
Against this backdrop, MSPs stand to play a role in migrating customers to the cloud and helping them optimize their use of cloud-based applications once they arrive. Apps Associates' survey reported 84% of respondents believe MSPs can "aid in the successful migration to the cloud" and 86% said MSPs could help them improve cloud consumption. In addition, 83% of the IT decision-makers polled said MSPs could help ease the complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
The Oracle customer survey underscores the shifting role of the MSP from the break/fix model to a business strategy built around customers' cloud adoption. Bill Saltys, senior vice president of alliances at Apps Associates, said MSPs now need to be "cloud-ready, if not cloud-native."
For MSPs, that direction calls for a different set of tools, automation and a more proactive stance, Saltys said.
"[MSPs] can't do it by looking at a monitor and waiting for a red light to come on," he said.
Other news
- AvePoint said it will use a newly disclosed $200 million round of funding to "accelerate its growth and investment" in channel offerings. The Jersey City, N.J., company offers MSPs tools for migrating, managing and protecting Office 365 environments. AvePoint plans to add more than 40,000 customers via channel sales in the next two years.
- In a bid to strengthen its managed security services capabilities, Accenture agreed to acquire Symantec's Cyber Security Services business from Broadcom. Accenture said the buyout includes a network of six security operations centers in the U.S., U.K. India, Australia, Singapore and Japan, and is expected to close in March 2020. The professional services firm also revealed plans to purchase Maihiro, an SAP Gold Partner, this week.
- Synnex Corp. is splitting into two publicly traded companies. One company, Synnex Technology Solutions, will provide IT distribution, logistics and integration services, while the other, Concentrix, will focus on global customer experience offerings, the company said. The split is expected to be completed in the second half of the year, according to Synnex.
- Distributor Avnet launched a partner program to help systems integrators and OEMs develop IoT offerings on the company's IoTConnect platform. Avnet said it plans to roll out a marketplace this spring for developers to sell IoT solutions.
- Insight Enterprises Inc., an IT services and cloud solutions provider based in Tempe, Ariz., is partnering with CoreView, a SaaS management platform for Office 365, to support businesses in the Italian market.
- Juniper Networks appointed Gordon Mackintosh as its worldwide vice president of channel and virtual sales. Mackintosh joins Juniper from Extreme Networks, were he served as global head of channels and distribution.
- Computer Data Source, a data center third-party maintenance and enterprise data storage provider, has named Dan Newton as CEO. Newton was formerly CEO of HiveIO. He has also worked for Datapipe, Dell and Perot Systems.
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