Dell EMC's Tomlin praises local partners for driving growth

UK channel boss opens up on his first year heading vendor's UK channel

Local partners have been the driving force behind Dell EMC's continued growth, said its UK channel boss Rob Tomlin.

Speaking with CRN at the recent Dell Technologies Forum in London, Tomlin reiterated his comments earlier this year that he is keen to work with more channel partners as they are key to continued growth for the vendor.

"We've made great investments over the years in all of our key partners and larger partners and we continue to do so, but, around the time I joined, we also doubled down on having more local partner managers working with our end user sales teams to win local business into local customers," he said.

"That's been super positive for us; that's a big channel investment that's all about connecting the partner with our end user sellers.

"Our partner account managers have done a super good job of getting those partners that are very much trusted advisors in the marketplace to be able to take their story to market with a Dell slant on it.

"We work with all the largest partners, but then also our local partners are taking us to market - which maybe years ago they didn't do - but we have to show up to get them onboard and enable them to sell with us."

Tomlin joined Dell just over a year ago from his role heading Tech Data's UK&I business, replacing Sarah Shields as UK channel boss.

At the time, he told CRN that he planned to recruit more specialist partners and develop closer ties with its existing partner base.

His first 12 months have been a "hell of a year" and he believes he has achieved those goals he set out at the beginning

"I set out to make big progress on multi cloud, to keep focusing our growth in servers in the channel and to drive recruitment enablement specialist partners," he stated.

"I think what I've learned along the way has been that Dell is really well-positioned right now in the marketplace and the partners are really embracing it and working closely with us as we grow the business."

Dell's recently announced Q3 results saw it cut its fiscal 2020 revenue forecast by nearly $3bn after it saw a drastic decline in its server revenues.

Tomlin, however, remained optimistic about the opportunity for business wins.

"We've had a really strong year on multi cloud, specifically; it's been driving our partner business. Our collaboration through partners in the channel around storage has been super successful and all of our partners are doing really well with us," he stated.

"It's been a great year to be a Dell storage partner, we've taken share, we've grown the business and there's not a partner I've talked to that isn't having a good year.

"I think we've still got a lot of opportunities to grow and to improve things but we've made good strides during the year and that reflects in our channel growth."