"Partners can play a significant role in accelerating storage growth"

In a chat with VARINDIA, Darren Sullivan, Senior Vice President, Global Partner Strategy, Dell EMC discusses about empowering partners with technology skill set, their role in growth, partner promotion etc.      

How Dell EMC sees its partner to play a major role in growth?
Partners can play a very significant role in helping us accelerate our growth in storage. Partners are oriented more toward solution selling with solving customer problems in the data center. We really can take advantage of those capabilities that partners have, driving bigger data center solutions which can help accelerate growth in storage and drive the business.    

We look in for partners to extend our reach, get to markets that we do not cover and expand with customers who are underpenetrated. We focus a lot of our time and energy with partners trying to find ways to find new markets, accounts, segments to serve. So that is a big area how we can expand with our partner base. 

How do you empower Partners with technology skill set?
We have a line of focused business in our program, training is very much around client, server, storage. One of the things that we are doing is figuring out about what we need to do to drive more solution orientation for future and some of the opportunities that we see in the industry. We are referring to Dell Technologies as partners and we want our channel partners to take advantage of the full suite of technologies that we have across the company - Dell EMC, VMware etc. So that we can help partners to work across Dell Technologies and really drive the agenda around digital transformation opportunities, IT, workforce and security transformation and drive more solution orientation with our customers through partners. That is something on which we are working hard to figure out what is going to take us to there as we are very product focus and line of business focus company as we are thinking of extending our future in that regard. 

How will you differentiate between Tier 1, 2, 3 channel?
We are spending a lot of time thinking about how to profile our partners, what are the capabilities that we need in organizations which  are working with us for the future and how do we motivate those types of organization to work with us, how to enable them.  

How do you promote the partners?
We have certain requirements in our program, they are based on either competencies like what types of certifications the partners have achieved within our technology offers and then what is the revenue. So we look in both the elements in terms of how we promote partners from our Gold Tier to Platinum Tier to Titanium. As partners grow in our program, they use the tier status as a branding mechanism. So if you are a Titanium partner in our program, partners use that to promote their capabilities and new values to customers and marketplace.