By Ramdas S, CRN, January 4, 1400 hrs
Dell expects more systems integrators (SIs) to join its Global Commercial Channels (GCC) program.
“We have been listening to partners, made several sweeping changes, and believe that we have the best commercial channel program in the industry today. We want more SIs to join us,” said Amit Midha, Vice President, APJ CSMB & Chairman, Dell China.
Midha informed that since the launch of the program the contribution of channels to Dell’s business stands at 28 percent worldwide. While Dell does not provide country-specific figures, in India the figure is likely to be higher than the world average.
Though nearly 2,000 partners have signed up for GCC in India since its launch in February 2011, only around 250 are active.
Midha said that several critical changes have been made to the program to ensure that it is more channel-friendly. While deal registration is a must for every price quote and billing, any partner winning a new account now gets a preferred status for the account. “Unless the customer specifically gives a written request, we will go with the partner who won the account,” he added.
Some partners point out that Dell does not have a fixed price-list for commercial products, but Midha said that this is advantageous for partners. “Every deal goes through multiple levels of negotiations, and partners need to take further discount and price approvals. Our pricing is dynamic, and reflects the latest market prices. Most products we can make available in 5-7 days. We are able to get price quotes out in 24 hours in 90 percent of the cases, and price clearances within 48 hours.”
Mahesh Bhalla, Executive Director, CSMB, Dell India, noted that the company has consciously decided to stay away from distributors for all commercial products. “Except for the tower servers—for which are distributed by Supertron—all other products such as Latitude, Optiplex, PowerEdge rack and blade servers, and storage solutions don’t have a distributor involved. For these partners work back-to-back with us. We have distributors like Redington and Cyberstar which fulfill such orders.”
Dell is upbeat about its storage business through channels. “With Powervault, Equallogic and now Compellent, we have the most exhaustive enterprise range of storage solutions. Every acquisition of Dell in the recent past has been of companies which have a strong channel model. We have taken some of their best practices and have included the same in the Dell PartnerDirect program,” said Midha.
Midha and Bhalla also stressed on the new incentive programs introduced. “We are providing not just incentives to partners for achieving targets but also providing incentives to partners’ sales staff who have specific targets. For upselling, the rebates have actually got a lot bigger,” said Bhalla. |