By now you will have seen the announcements we have been making about changes to our organisation to introduce global customer business units. Dell is organising itself globally around four major customer segments - Large Enterprise, Public, Small and Medium Business, and Consumer (already operating globally).
I appreciate that you will have many questions at this point on how Dell’s reorganisation affects our channel business and partners. I want to emphasise that the new structure does not affect Dell’s ongoing commitment to our partners globally. We have worked hard to earn your trust. While our channel partners will not be directly affected by the restructuring, the efficiencies and synergies that result from this should positively influence our channel business and better position it to serve partners and your customers.
PartnerDirect has been critical to the success of our business. In a little over twelve months, we have 36,000 registered partners across 148 countries. Dell’s revenue from solution providers grew from $9 billion to $12 billion worldwide, and the PartnerDirect portal is available in 19 languages. This success means that we remain committed to our partners and to growing PartnerDirect.
Over the past year, we’ve made every effort to listen to our channel partners and to respond to their needs to simplify IT, reduce costs and maximise productivity. In 2008, Dell made significant accomplishments in driving simplification around:
· Supercomputing
· De-duplication
· Disaster recovery
· Virtualization
With the changes to the organisation, I’d like to take this opportunity to announce that Greg Davis, General Manager of Americas Channel Group will assume a global role in running our channel business. Greg launched PartnerDirect in the US, and has accomplished several significant milestones, including recruiting around 16,000 partners in North America. We will formally announce the European team and more details on the reorganisation in the near future.
It was a privilege to launch Dell’s first partner program across eighteen countries in Europe, and an exciting and fulfilling challenge for me. Over the last twelve months we built a compelling and robust program for our partners in Europe like no other.
As you may have seen, going forward I will be leading the Public business in EMEA, which is an exciting new challenge for me. Over the years we have all seen how technology can fundamentally help improve the lives of every citizen. We help our public customers use technology to address challenges that matter to us all – the education of our children, the effectiveness of our healthcare, our safety, democracy and efficiency of the public services we use every day.
I am confident that Greg will continue to grow and expand PartnerDirect, and that his new role will provide even more global efficiencies for Dell’s world-class partner program. Please join me in welcoming Greg to this new chapter in Dell’s history and journey.
All the best for 2009.
Josh Claman