Dell AU cross-pollinates smaller partners

Dell Technologies is making an effort to ensure its smaller partners understand its full product portfolio.

CRN yesterday met with Tian Beng Ng, the company’s APJ channel lead, and ANZ distribution lead Lynn Nicol, to talk about their current channel plans.

The pair said the company is currently directing its efforts towards partners in the Gold and Authorised tiers of its program. The reason is that Dell Technologies feels comfortable that its larger partners are in good shape and understand the breadth of the company’s offerings, making it time to share some love with smaller partners that work through distribution.

Part of this new effort is to ensure that partners that first engaged with pre-merger Dell or EMC understand the opportunities afforded by the combined Dell Technologies portfolio.

“It’s trying to get the relationship across all the lines of business, and getting the lift from that,” Nicol explained.

Dell Technologies is therefore investing in enablement through its disties (Ingram, Dicker Data and Tech Data) with the aim of helping infrastructure resellers understand its client business, and PC-centric resellers move into server and storage sales.

Storage is a sweet spot, said Tian, thanks in part to mid-range customers repatriating workloads they’ve sent to the cloud. Such customers are buying mid-range storage, he said, as they seek infrastructure capable of both scaling as they wield more data and serving I/O intensive applications.

Hyperconverged infrastructure also remains a hot product for the channel, as does data protection give that’s a universal requirement.