Dell Financial Services turns towards channel
Investment in indirect business mirrors Dell's wider strategy of increasing its channel mix, DFS UK boss Jim Findlay tells CRN
Dell Financial Services (DFS) is launching a UK channel push as it expands the range of cloud financing options available to customers and partners.
Talking to CRN, DFS UK and Ireland sales director Jim Findlay said Dell's captive finance arm is aggressively increasing its channel headcount, which he said is in line with Dell's wider UK strategy.
A new DFS UK channel director has been hired in the form of Jason Skidmore, who joins from rival leasing house GE Capital, Findlay revealed.
The channel assault comes after DFS unveiled three new cloud products under the Scale Ready Payment Solutions banner in August and Findlay said related marketing materials would hit UK partners in the coming weeks.
The trio of new financing products - dubbed Pay As You Grow, Provision And Pay and Scale On Demand - have been launched in response to the growing need among customers and partners to defer payments as they build out cloud solutions, Findlay said.
"We are responding to a market trend here as the market shifts more towards cloud," he said.
"This will help Dell and its channel partners close more transactions with customers. We want to grow in this market as that is where the market is growing. It's a huge change in terms of how customers are acquiring equipment."
Channel partners can use all three options either as a sales tool to help customers build cloud solutions or for their own operations, Findlay stressed.
The Pay As You Grow package is aimed at customers who want to scale up usage over a period of time, Findlay explained, while Provision and Pay is for customers who are deploying a large volume of infrastructure and need a few months to pay back the investment. That could be a hoster or reseller, or an end user, he said.
The third option, Scale On Demand, is a more bespoke option aimed at customers who need to pay for technology over a period of time, but based on their actual usage, Findlay explained.
DFS UK's headcount expansion will come not only from new hires but also from redeploying existing DFS staff working on direct deals, Findlay added.
"We are redeploying some resource in the direct segment to make our offering stronger," he said. "This is in line with Dell's UK strategy in the channel, which is to increase the channel mix - we are responding to that. We are working with a pretty decent number of channel partners in the UK and are getting more requests for support coming in."
Findlay (pictured) claimed captive finance houses such as DFS offers resellers several advantages over competitors, including being able to approve more deals and offer better rates.
"We see the value [the deal] is generating by the whole transaction. We are here to support Dell and the partner base, so we are more likely to say yes," he said.
DFS European presence is based on the Dell Bank International's 2013 acquisition of a chunk of CIT.
"As a captive, we operate under a bank licence and the advantage of that is we are able to offer loans to customers in areas such as software and services financing. You can't put that on a lease."
DFS recently developed an online tool that allows partners and distributors to do their own credit checks "in a matter of minutes", Findlay added.
"This will allow channel partners to move at velocity," he said. "We are making it available to channel partners and it will go out at the same time as the Scale Ready Payment Solutions."