The News: Dell rolled out its 2024 Partner Program as part of its new fiscal year program. The new program has a consistent tiered structure that focuses on collaboration, acquisition, and investment in critical growth areas to drive shared success. You can read more on the Dell Technologies website.
Dell Rolls Out Its 2024 Partner Program
Analyst Take: As most programs, this is an incremental shift, enabling partners to build on their success with Dell, as opposed to a rapid restructuring to adopt a vendor’s new game plan. As Dell well knows, this approach makes for a strong and loyal following when partners can trust their investments have long-term returns.
Building on the Momentum of Multi-Cloud and APEX and Preparing for AI Deployments
Denise Millard, Senior Vice President, Global Alliances, Industries, Partner Strategy & Programs at Dell, talked about the continued focus on building the ISG business and customers’ multi-cloud strategy along with accelerating the big bets that Dell is making in the areas of AI, security, and edge technologies. Key adjustments to the partner program include accelerating the ‘easy button” for customers with changes to APEX compensation. Second, increasing rates of return for New Business Incentives (NBI), including the focus on APEX and PowerFlex. And building out competencies for AI initiatives.
Changes to APEX
Taking the first item, APEX. Adoption of subscriptions services by partners has been difficult, while most vendors have fully adjusted to compensate for the cashflow impact of consumption models, there has still been a preference to promote CAPEX offerings. Dell has paid a front-end incentive (a percentage of the total contract value); partners did not earn other rebates or benefits from the transaction. The company’s tweak to the program adjusts the upfront payment and recognizes the rebates and NBI bonuses. Each partner will need to examine their status and profitability as they will vary by partner level.
AI Adoption
Dell recognizes AI is still in the early days of client adoption, citing research of the $160 billion opportunity by 2028. The company’s focus is getting partners ready with competencies. We also see this, especially as clients struggle with the data preparedness, focused use cases, and the broad range of technologies to be utilized to bring AI into the core workflow of business. This will require consulting services and capabilities at a business unit level, DevOps and ITOps. Expect Dell to build out training and competencies at all levels of AI consulting, though with a heavy focus on the ISG offerings, such as APEX Cloud Platforms and core supporting technologies.
Partner-First Storage Strategy
Last commentary is on Dell’s Partner First Strategy for Storage, which was rolled out in August 2023. Today, the company cites 99% of its customers are eligible. To further encourage appropriate selling behavior, Dell pays the assigned sellers more when transacting through a partner. Within the program, Dell has a qualification for customers called Partner of Record (POR). This setup encourages the use of partners with long-term, consistent relationships when it comes to upgrades and new opportunities. The POR has now been extended to Dell’s server offerings.
Overall, Dell is continuing in its commitment to partners while recognizing the necessity to change up for the next generation of applications that are hitting organizations.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
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MWC24: Dell and Nokia Have Their Mind Set on Private 5G
Author Information
Camberley brings over 25 years of executive experience leading sales and marketing teams at Fortune 500 firms. Before joining The Futurum Group, she led the Evaluator Group, an information technology analyst firm as Managing Director.
Her career has spanned all elements of sales and marketing including a 360-degree view of addressing challenges and delivering solutions was achieved from crossing the boundary of sales and channel engagement with large enterprise vendors and her own 100-person IT services firm.
Camberley has provided Global 250 startups with go-to-market strategies, creating a new market category “MAID” as Vice President of Marketing at COPAN and led a worldwide marketing team including channels as a VP at VERITAS. At GE Access, a $2B distribution company, she served as VP of a new division and succeeded in growing the company from $14 to $500 million and built a successful 100-person IT services firm. Camberley began her career at IBM in sales and management.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in International Business from California State University – Long Beach and executive certificates from Wellesley and Wharton School of Business.
