3 Dell Channel Executives. 5 Bloggers. 2 Dell Partners. One Room. 45 Minutes. Party time!

We all had 3 shots of tequila. Dell Channel Chief Greg Davis shouted, “I love you guys!”, and then the Dell Storage Forum Channel Media Roundtable began.

OK, that didn’t really happen. But here’s what did.

Any time you are invited to a “Channel Media Roundtable” you can expect a scripted controlled event.  But like many things at the Dell Storage Forum, things were not what I expected.

Bob Skelley, Dell’s Executive Director, Global Channel Partner Program and Channel kicked it off by listing some numbers that show how far the Dell Partner program has come in the last 3 1/12 years.

”If you took our channel business and broke it out as a separate company it would be number 350 on the Fortune 500.”

“We've had 40% growth in our channel business in the 1^st quarter of the year,.”

“We've had over 16,000 deal registrations, in the US alone last quarter.  Up 46%"

“We currently have 1400 Certified partners in North America, 2500 globally.  The Compellent acquisition alone added 200 net new certified partners.”

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, partners seem genuinely happy with Dell.

Sonia St. Charles, the CEO of Davenport Group was asked: “You’ve been working with Dell for a few years, how do you see it today?”

“The tools and support have evolved tremendously over that last 3 years.  We loved Compellent’s program and Dell has incorporated that into their program.”

Frank Politano, from Syscom Technologies added, “When the EqualLogic acquisition happened we were worried that they were going to change the technology. But, in fact, they have improved the technology, and have responded to our needs. The process that we go through today to get a deal registration is 48 to 72 hours.  I’d like to see that get faster, but it has been very easy work with Dell on these deals.”

I asked Greg Davis, who for the last 3 and a half years has been Dell’s Channel Chief if there was an AH-HA moment at Dell, where they finally understood the value of the channel.

There were some very basic principals that we said as a team we were going to do.

First, we are going to do what we said we are going to do. When we started this channel program 3 and a half years ago we had a white board of 40 ideas.  But we had to take them in small chunks so we did the top three.  Then once we got those done we made a new list, and took the top 3 from that. And as a collective team we continue to do that.  We take ideas from partners and build them into what we can deliver on.

The second thing is we never thought that we would wake up one morning and 20,000 partners would get on board. It took a lot of internal selling, external selling, evangelizing our partner program message. Recruiting new partners, segmenting those that fit.

We got fortunate that the acquisitions we made all were great companies with a great group of people who knew channels, and they helped us ramp this up much faster than I thought.

And we also took the long view, in that we have just kept building on the program.  We have tried very hard to never take anything away, but to keep adding what the partners have asked for.

We are still changing the culture inside Dell, when new people come on board we train them on engaging the channel.

We built a great team to make this happen.  We have tried very hard to focus on just a few things at a time.  Everyday there is a struggle; everyday there is a win.  And looking at it collectively, I think we have accomplished a lot.

Bob Skelley, added, “The culture at Dell is rapidly changing.  We are really trying to evangelize the good things that come from engaging with our partners.”

So, in closing, it would appear that the long hard process of putting together a successful channel program at Dell is paying off.  Still issues, but they are slowing being chipped away.

Dell has embraced the channel, and is, STEP BY STEP, INTERNAL BATTEL BY INTERNAL BATTLE, getting it right.

I never thought I’d write those words.

Maybe it is the Tequila talking.