Dell 'simplifies' and expands partner programme

EMEA PartnerDirect to get additional investment, vendor promises

Dell is looking to earn half of its western European revenue through the channel in just a few years and is streamlining, simplifying and expanding investment to make that happen.

Aongus Hegarty, EMEA president at Dell, said the idea is to achieve a "simplified" go-to-market model that supports customer and channel from start to finish.

"Now our channel in western Europe is a third of our business [in western Europe], and next year it will be 40 per cent, and in the next few years it will be 50 per cent. I have no doubt about that," Hegarty told a channel news conference at Dell Enterprise Forum EMEA in Frankfurt today.

On top of the expansion of Dell Financial Services as reported in ChannelWeb this morning, there will be six times the current access to demo equipment and a two per cent software-sales rebate for Premier partners to encourage the continuing integration of software provision with Dell as a whole.

The company has also been restructuring its management to boost emphasis on the channel and increase its speed and agility across all partner relationships and sales.

It already has just one EMEA president – Hegarty – instead of having different heads for public sector, SMB, and enterprise business, for example.

Increasingly, Dell sales will focus on encouraging "end-to-end" sales that include products from the whole portfolio, including software, storage, servers, clients and security as well.

Hegarty promised that rebates would be more generous for multi-product deals. The deal registration and lead generation activity – taking a more "channel-led" approach – supported by Dell is also being boosted to help partners.

However, when asked, Dell executives could not say how much additional investment this represented.

"I can say that we've invested $3m (£1.8m) over the past 30 to 60 days, so that's one figure," Hegarty said.

Laurent Binetti, general manager for EMEA channel sales at Dell, said that outside western Europe, channel sales in various emerging regions are already more than 50 per cent of Dell's business there – and there are some areas which have been exclusively channel for Dell for years.

EMEA, and in fact all of Dell, are being increasingly harmonised in approach – although Binetti hastened to add that "some localisation" will be retained.