Dell designed Apex to meet channel demands
Vendor’s recently-launched as-a-service offering was rolled out after the firm sought plenty of feedback from partners
Dell’s UK channel boss is expecting the vendor’s Apex as-a-service offering will hit the mark because the option has been designed with strong feedback from partners.
Apex took centre stage at the Dell World event back in May, and adds to a growing list of vendor-as-a-service offerings created to react tom customer demand. Rob Tomlin, vice-president of channels for UK and Ireland at Dell, said it had as-a-service options, such as Flex on Demand, in the market for years, but had pulled things together and listened to partners with Apex and the expectations were high that it was going to be a popular choice for partners.
“We’ve definitely listened to the feedback of the partners, we’ve watched what the competition have done in the past and the competition in many different formats in in the hybrid cloud space,” he said. “We listened to the things that were around the risk of balance sheet and the ability to to go to market from a consumption based model, and we’ve we pivoted our programmes and our tooling, and our sales motions.
“The real core opportunity for our channel partners around Apex is to get to the hybrid experience that customers are really asking for,” said Tomlin. “To take them on a journey where their customers can still have public cloud, but actually to give them the predictability and security of of a hybrid approach.
“From a channel partners perspective, that gives great services opportunity. So channel partners can wrap all the services around still enabling the customer to move [to the cloud], but actually give them that predictability and security services that they would like.”
Dayne Turbitt, general manager at Dell UK, acknowledged that some partners might view Apex as a late entrant to the market but the firm had been offering flexible services to some customers for almost a decade, and had made sure that when it did launch a unified approach it was the best available.
“What we’ve done is we’ve learned from the market, we’ve learned from our channel partners and our clients on how to best productise it,” he said. “We’re bringing it to market in a productised fashion and we’ve taken the advice of our many channel partners on what’s best for them in terms of their business, as well as what’s best for our clients.”
Momentum
Tomlin added that momentum continued to flow through the channel and the contribution from the indirect part of the business now totalled $54bn annually.
“Or channel basis continues at pace,” he said. “The channel is important to Dell and the way we work together continues to be fantastic. Our channel partners have been really resilient, and they’ve enabled Dell to jointly deliver to our joint customers.
“The feedback I get from our partners during this period has been that Dell has been a consistently reliable partner that’s leveraged it’s world-class supply chain to keep our distributors stocked,” said Tomlin. “We continue to do that, even though we know we’re going to have supply challenges to the end of the year, we strategically work to ensure that Dell has products on the shelf is able to deliver and satisfy its customers.”
