Dell Technologies is riding a wave of increases in sales made through the channel at the half-way point of its fiscal year that has seen channel partners land new or reactivate 35,000 customers in the last 12 months.
In the last 12 months Dell Technologies booked $52 billion in orders via the channel, an 11% increase year over year, says Cheryl Cook, senior vice president for global partner marketing at Dell Technologies.
Dell Technologies also revealed that sales through distributors were up 9%. In terms of product categories, Dell Technologies said server sales via the channel are up 13%, storage revenue is up 15%, client systems revenue increased 6% and financial services revenue is up 9%.
Dell Technologies has been providing partners with 8% additional rebates to its best partners to drive storage sales, an offer it is now extending to its authorized partners, Dell also gives partners an 8% rebate for all deals involving a competitive swap and 8% for new customer accounts. In total, Dell in the last 12 months passed on server and sales leads valued at $1.3 billion to partners.
Those results are impressive given the fact that International Data Corp. (IDC) recently noted vendor revenue from sales of IT infrastructure products (server, enterprise storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud environments, including public and private cloud, declined 10.2% year over year in the second quarter of 2019 , reaching $14.1 billion. IDC also lowered its forecast for total spending on cloud IT infrastructure in 2019 to $63.6 billion, down 4.9% from last quarter’s forecast and changing from expected growth to a year-over-year decline of 2.1%.
At the same time, IDC notes worldwide converged systems market revenue increased 10.9% year over year to $3.9 billion during the second quarter of 2019, with Dell Technologies having the largest share (29%) with $533.2 million in revenue. Much of that effort is focusing on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) running VMware software.
“Hyperconverged is gaining traction,” says Cook.
Dell Technologies this week also revealed it now has awarded 4,400 partner of record designations across server and storage accounts that ensure partners are not left of out of IT deals in those accounts. Dell Technologies is also advising partners to update before January their certifications, some of which can take as much as 70 hours to attain.
Finally, Dell Technologies is now making it possible for Dell salespeople to register deals on behalf of partners and allowing partners to now place orders without help from Dell salespeople.
With Dell Technologies seeing double-digit sales growth in both servers and storage it’s clear there’s still a lot of money to be made selling data center infrastructure. The challenge partner now face is making sure they have the skills required to tap into that opportunity.
Be First to Comment