Storage remains a priority at Dell

One of the themes in the Dell channel throughout the last 18 months has been around the storage opportunity with the vendor wanting partners to sell more of those products.

There have been partner programmes and rebates designed to help drive fresh business around storage and while that has seen the firm now deliver a third consecutive quarter of growth in that segment there is still more work to be done.

Dell shared its Q3 numbers yesterday and in a conference call with analysts there were signs that the push on storage remains one of the top priorities at the vendor.

For the three months ended 2 November storage sales increased year-on-year by 6% to $3.9bn, which was the third consecutive quarter of growth.

"Quite frankly, we would have liked to have seen higher growth in storage this quarter, but we do believe we have taken the right actions to drive meaningful long-term improvements in the storage business," said Dell CFO Tom Sweet.

"We've had three straight quarters now of year-over-year growth in storage and the longer term framework is such that we have to roughly recapture about 60% to 70% of the share loss that we experienced over the previous almost 4 years before we started turning the corner this year," he added.

A lot of that growth has come through moves that Dell has made both internally with sales teams as well as its external work encouraging the channel to sell more of the servers and storage that are covered under the infrastructure solutions group umbrella.

"We've stabilized a business that was in decline. We have work to do to continue to grow...part of the growth plan is investing in sales capacity and coverage to grow the buyer base," said Jeff Clarke, vice chairman, products and operations at Dell.

"We are committed to grow the buyer base. We need more storage buyers and we are putting in the capacity in both our enterprise and commercial sales organizations to do so," he added "We continue to focus on accelerating the velocity in mid-range storage through significant investments in our go to market engine to increase capacity and coverage, focused innovation to increase the competitiveness of the portfolio and working towards a new mid-range product that is expected to be available by the end of next year."