The alliances area of Dell EMC has developed a special channel program specifically for cloud solution providers along with service providers that will fit inside the overall program released earlier this year.
Called the Dell EMC Cloud Service Provider and Strategic Outsourcer Program Track, this new offering targets cloud service providers along with traditional service providers.
Dell EMC is investing in these two groups which roughly work out to be more than 200 partners worldwide. But the small number should not fool you as this group brings in many billions of dollars to Dell EMC and according to David Trigg, vice president of strategy for service providers in the Dell EMC Global Alliances team, this segment has been growing in the double digit range. Going forward, Trigg said, the target is accelerate it by 100 per cent in the next calendar year.
Trigg also told CDN these new tracks include, for the first time, rebates similar to the solution provider program. Another first is Dell EMC new product business unit will have a focus on cloud providers and service providers in hopes of producing more integration business solutions.
The underlining strategy behind these two new channel tracks is the on-set of the digital transformation era. Trigg said service providers have had to re-think its offerings with new services and consumption models.
In the first half of this year the program anticipates paying out one per cent rebates for Platinum partners and 1.4 per cent for Titanium partners. Dell EMC has not yet decided rebates for Gold partners.
But there is also an Earned Business Development Fund opportunity that will kick in an extra quarter percentage to Platinum level partners and 0.4 per cent to those in Titanium specific to server, storage and networking products. This will not include RSA security, Virtustream, and VMware.
The rebates and earned business development funds will work like this:
If you are a Platinum Partner and you have reached the $15 million clip level, you will be paid $37,500 in earned development funds on top of your $150,000 rebate cheque. If you manage some line of business sales the rebate can grow to $225,000 as partners get rewarded with a Line of Business margin accelerator bonus from meeting two or three Lines of Business revenue thresholds. And, that rebate accelerator applies back to the partners first dollar earned.
In the Titanium section, on a $30 million threshold the earned development funds would total $120,000 and the rebate would be $420,000. Again, do some line of business work and it goes up to $525,000.
Trigg said that the threshold would be altered to each region around the world including Canada.
“This is a significant investment made by the company. We fundamentally believe in this space with partners. We are working to keep our direct sales reps from competing with them. So we have made sure it is at least compensation neutral and there’ll be an uplift for them to work with partners who are most invested and aligned,” Trigg said.
The service provider area will offer various tested and validated systems for this community to use. The new validated systems include compute, storage and open networking products.
One of the unique aspects of this program is the way Dell EMC is connecting Cloud Services Providers with solution providers.
Cloud Providers throughout this program will gain access new markets, regions, and verticals, while benefiting from the selling expertise of solution providers who own the relationships with IT departments or Line of Business decision markers.
Meanwhile, solution providers through the cloud providers will get a chance to expand product line by reselling cloud services and enabling hybrid IT at a minimal investment because reselling cloud services over building your own is much cheaper. And, they will still retain customer account control under the new Dell EMC cloud track.
“We believe this is a big area of profitability and we want to make sure to continue to deliver profitable solutions so the partners can make more money. We plan on rewarding these partners for this type of behavior especially if they can driver these solutions globally,” Trigg said.
What kind of service/cloud providers Dell EMC is talking about? Well, according to a blog post by Tom Burns, a senior vice president at the company, they are looking at all types of providers including communications service providers; cable multiple system operators; hosting/co-location providers; public cloud providers; vertical market cloud specialists; and consumer webtech providers. Some of these partners are high profile system integrators such as Accenture and Deloitte, but it will include cloud providers like RackForce.
