New incentives For Dell Apex, PC and storage: Five changes to Dell's 2024 partner programme
Dell Technologies has a new channel leader in Denise Millard and a new channel programme with plans to kick off the year by growing and modernising its core business through partners
To break out of its current No. 3 market position in the category, the company is leaning on partners, with incentives around PC peripherals as well as on workstations, displays and rugged laptops.
Steering the channel ship along the richer course is Denise Millard, chief partner officer at Dell Technologies, who said the aging fleet of COVID-era PCs, and the advent of AI-enabled Copilots that are being deployed for productivity will both act on the market to drive new device and peripheral sales.
"There is definitely going to be a PC refresh cycle opportunity," Millard said. "As applications like Copilot and others are deployed, users will require that level of capability, locally and on their device. And there is a windows refresh that is coming. So with those drivers in mind, in addition to the program changes, I feel like we're really well-positioned to go into the new year with partners."
Dell is already the global leader in IT infrastructure, selling more servers and storage than rivals at HPE and Lenovo. Dell holds the No. 1 spot in external enterprise storage with 32.6 per cent share and high-end storage with 45.8 per cent share, according to 2023 numbers from IDC. It is also the leader in x86 servers with 13.4 per cent of unit share.
Darren Sullivan, Dell's senior vice president global partner programme and operations, said in addition to richer client business, Apex consumption will now be available for back-end incentives and base rebates and new business incentives.
"What we're doing is taking this opportunity to just fully embed all of our offers together in a common framework," Sullivan said. "It further ties Apex in to our overall strategy and really brings the full portfolio together whether its CapEx (hardware) or Apex together so that our partners can understand how to engage with us from a profitability perspective, in a consistent way."
Dell won approximately 50 per cent of its net revenue in the previous four quarters through partners. Partners also brought Dell 60 per cent of its new and returning business. Millard said it's time to bump those numbers up.
"You're going to see us really focus on how do we continue to grow share? How do we work with and through our ecosystem to accelerate those market growth opportunities both in our core businesses as well as the big bet areas?" Millard told CRN US. "AI and multi-cloud and edge are increasingly becoming important, both in customer conversations and in the outcomes that we're delivering, as well as doubling down on our ISG (Infrastructure Solution Group) business."
Dell is turning to partners to help increase its market leadership with programs like partner-first for storage, which was devised by Millard's boss Bill Scannell, to capture even greater storage share as massive data opportunities around AI come over the horizon. Through partner-first for storage, Scannell, Dell's president of global sales and customer operations, incentivised Dell's direct sales force to move through partners to close deals.
Additionally, Dell quadrupled the number of partners of record inside storage. So as opposed to taking accounts direct, Dell is incentivising its sales force to work with partners in 99 per cent of its accounts.
"I would say our programme and our focus on this ecosystem is working," Millard said. "What we launched last August with partner-first strategy for storage, as part of that we made over 99 per cent of our customers and perspective customers partner-first. We quadrupled the number of accounts eligible for this, the partner of record status, and then we pay our sales teams more to work with and through partners. We are seeing massive collaboration and all of our KPIs are trending in a really positive way."
Millard said Dell is celebrating its 40th birthday this year, and part of that celebration is to double down on its commitment to partners.
"There's huge excitement across Dell for the power of partnership and the role that we're seeing the ecosystem play," she said. "This is an exciting time to be a partner with Dell. We are doubling down in many areas and if you think about the big bets that we talk about, we can't deliver those outcomes without partners. They're playing a more pivotal role in those go to market areas."
Here are five things to know about the changes to Dell's 2024 partner programme.
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