Dell CEO praises partners

Dell Technologies’ chairman, CEO and members of the vendor’s senior leadership team have expressed their support and appreciation of channel partners.

Michael Dell, speaking at the Dell Technologies Summit Unplugged, responded to a MicroScope question around his attitude towards partners.

The company’s CEO said he had recently been at a virtual roundtable with UK partners and believed that they had done a “fantastic job” for the vendor over the course of the pandemic.

“They’ve done a fantastic job during the last 18/19 months in delivering [our] solutions to customers, and partnership is quite strong, growth within and through the channel is very strong,” he said.

Dell added that growing the vendor’s share in vertical markets was also something that it looked to partners to support. “This is an area where partners play an enormous role with reach and access and understanding and depth so there’s tonnes of value add,” he said.

Dell said the way customers consumed technology was changing and the vendor was evolving in line with that and was seeing “great success with our channel partners and great engagement”.

“[Our channel partners] have done a fantastic job during the last 18/19 months in delivering [our] solutions to customers”

Michael Dell, Dell Technologies

Chuck Whitten, co-chief operating officer at Dell Technologies, added that the recent performance of the channel showed just how important they were to the vendor.

“In the first half of this year, order revenue for our clients’ position, our clients’ solutions business, through the channel was up 49%, so we love the channel,” he said.

“Our strategies are designed to drive sustained profitable growth across all of our routes to market, and our channel partners, as well as the verticalisation and the services that they add, are key to customer acquisition. So, we like channel partners that have deep customer relations, but also ones that bring us new problems to solve,” he added.

“In the first half, partners brought in 62% of Dell’s new and reactivated buyers, so these are very complementary routes to market,” he said.

The summit session not only included impressive growth figures from the channel business, but also presented a chance for Jeff Clarke, vice-chairman and co-chief operating officer at the vendor, to outline the opportunity for further expansion.

“Our core business is large. We operate in a large, stable market that’s growing. It’s a $670bn TAM [total available market] growing at 3%, or $81bn, so we have lots of room to grow. It’s built on the fact that we have what we like to call internally a durable set of competitive advantages. Our go-to-market model is unique, distinctive to us, it gives us a customer intimacy we believe we have that’s differentiated over everybody else,” he said.

“We believe we have a different innovation engine that allows us to innovate and deliver differentiated products in the broadest range in the industry today. We have an at-scale global supply chain, we have a global service organisation. Lastly, we have our own financing arm. We believe that set of competitive advantages serves us well to serve that very large marketplace,” he added.