Channel Chief
“Services will create new opportunities”
 Dell has recently launched a slew of services, which it believes will open up new vistas of opportunity for partners. Neeraj Singh, Head, Commercial Channel Operations, Dell India, spoke to Tabrez Khan about these offerings
Can you elaborate on the recently launched Dell services?
Dell services offered through partners are classified into two parts. First comprises infrastructure consulting services that include practices like Microsoft Exchange implementation and migration, virtualization of server and storage—where we are closely partnering with both VMware and Microsoft—and data center and client management services. In each one of these, we have some capabilities within the organization but for the last mile execution there is a huge partner play involved.
The second part is the annual maintenance contract (AMC) services. We have designed a program which allows partners to become authorized service providers for new customer accounts and those they are already managing, provided they have the requisite infrastructure and capabilities. To ensure they are equipped to handle the responsibility, we do a thorough assessment of their capabilities and inspect their infrastructure.
How big is the services opportunity currently?
It is early days yet, but globally 10 percent of our business comes from services. However, majority of these services are tied to the box. There is a plan to make these services independent of the hardware we sell, and keep increasing their share on a quarter-on-quarter basis.
Do you think Indian partners are ready to leverage these services opportunities?
Indian partners may not have the expertise in every practice, but they certainly do have it in some. I have interacted with a few large partners who have impressive skill-sets in services and solutions related to Microsoft. There are some who have expertise in other areas.
We plan to train partners on practices other than their specialization to increase their overall revenue pie from high-margin service offerings.
What is Dell’s strategy for cloud computing? What is the role you envision for partners in it?
Our cloud services strategy has three key tenets. First is flexibility, which basically means that our customers can choose offerings they need and as and when they need. Second is ease of implementation so that customers get up and running quickly. Last is high availability for extremely critical applications such as e-mail. With Dell Email Management Services, we assure customers 60-second failover, so that they are not impacted by the downtime.
The idea is to free up the time of our customers’ IT staff for large strategic projects like virtualization, storage consolidation and OS migrations.
We intend to work closely with enterprise-focused partners on our cloud initiatives. In the SMB space, despite the current buzz around this concept, there is a complete lack of education on how cloud computing can greatly benefit small businesses who have little IT investments. We plan to work jointly with our partners to create awareness so that once customers realize the benefits of these services, we win the business together.
You continue to sell your SMB products back-to-back. Any plans to adopt a stock-and-sell model, at least for some of the volume products?
Our focus so far has really been on the mid-market where the back-to-back model serves us well.
From a partner perspective, those that merely resell will obviously not benefit from this model. However, value-added resellers and solution providers have welcomed it because they no longer have to store inventory or be constantly reminded by our sales team about how much stock they have to pick up from us. Instead, they can focus solely on generating leads and business development, and that prospect is appealing for most of them.
Having said that, we will continue to evaluate options that help us and our partners grow profitably.
You have recently appointed Neoteric Infomatique as your national distributor. What is the nature of the relationship?
We have had Iris as our national distributor for some time who fulfills back-to-back orders. Neoteric will play a similar role; having a second distributor allows us to target a larger base of partners. Both have an exclusive partner base that we can target.
However, we will adhere to our tenets of limited distribution, limited number of partners and a deeper and more fulfilling relationship with each of these partners. |