Channel now bigger than direct for Dell in EMEA

Dell says breaking 50 per cent barrier is a symbolic marker in PartnerDirect's five-year journey

Dell's channel business has passed 50 per cent of its overall sales in EMEA, a milestone the vendor claims shows how far it has come since it launched PartnerDirect five years ago.

Talking at Dell's European Solutions Conference in Madrid, vice president of EMEA channel sales Emmanuel Mouquet revealed that PartnerDirect is on course to be a $2.5bn (£1.5bn) business in western Europe this year, up from $2bn last year.

With global systems integrator and OEM sales conducted in the region, as well as partner sales in emerging EMEA markets - where Dell has always operated a channel model - added in, the total indirect sales tally now makes up half of the region's total.

"This is an important symbol that says a lot about the transformation we have been through in the past five years," Mouquet said.

PartnerDirect will celebrate its fifth anniversary in EMEA on 1 February, 2013. The programme now encompasses 900 certified partners in EMEA, 100 of which sit in the higher-level, Premier tier.

"We started in a room like this, with 10 people, a bit more than five years ago after Michael [Dell] told us we are launching a channel," Mouquet said. "We spent the first six months just meeting partners. I remember one UK partner at the time saying [when they heard we were launching into the channel] ‘over my dead body', and now they are one of our best partners in the UK."

Dell's PartnerDirect business grew by about 20 per cent in western Europe in its fiscal Q1 and Q2, putting it on course to hit $2.5bn revenue this year. Organic growth was still in the double digits, Mouquet said.

But Mouquet said the aim is to quadruple that tally in the next five to seven years or so. "We talk about the $10bn mission," he said.

"$2.5bn probably gives us about 10 per cent of the partners' spending. That $10bn we believe will be about 25 per cent of what the partners will spend."

Although Dell's overall revenue declined in its last fiscal quarter, it datacentre business grew six per cent. Mouquet said the market wrongly still sees Dell as just a PC company.

"In our latest results, a third of our business is datacentre solutions and two thirds is around device and PCs - but if you look at profit, more than half comes from datacentre," he said.

"Dell of the future is about bringing end-to-end solutions, and devices are part of that. One of the themes for partners today is to welcome them to the new Dell, as we truly believe the company we are today is very different from five years ago."