June 2009 - Dell Channel Blog

This week we announced the Enterprise Architecture Partner of the Year Awards (Note:  Login to the Partner Portal before linking to read the announcement). Congratulations to the winners:  (National) GreenPages, Open Storage Solutions and Nviron and (Regional) Corporate IT Solutions, Syscom Technologies, Keep IT Simple, Eagle Software and OPUS Consulting Group.

Looking back at the nomination award forms, I see a number of common threads.  First, these partners lead with Dell solutions to their customers, solving their critical business challenges using a consultative approach from needs assessment right through to planning and deployment. Second, despite encountering initial bumps in the PartnerDirect program road and challenges engaging with the Dell direct account team, these Partners persevered by staying the course – building relationships across all the Dell lines of business and customer segments and by figuring out how to best work together with the Dell Channel and direct account teams teams to grow their businesses.  And, third, these Partners fully utilize Dell Certified Partner resources by participating in Dell training programs, holding lead generation, tradeshow, and solutions events, scheduling Call Blitz Days, and passing along incentive and promotion opportunities.  In some cases, this level of engagement has earned Partners significant--even high double-digit growth year over year.

Having personally called each of these Partners to notify them of the award, I can tell you they were all very excited to be a “Partner of the Year” and looking forward to leveraging this recognition in their marketing efforts and in the press.  Even more important, the awards are just one more way they’ve been rewarded for their willingness to work through challenges with us and take advantage of the Dell brand and market share opportunities.  That’s the secret in the sauce.

Yesterday, we had a live webinar for our PartnerDirect partners designed to provide ideas and guidance on how to drive more virtualization business with your customers.

Three things you will learn more about during the webinar include:

· How to help your customers achieve an 8 month ROI on server consolidation

· How to leverage virtualization to increase availability and faster recovery when/if disruptions occur.

· How to deploy servers 43% faster than previously possible

Dell is working hard to demystify the complexity associated with virtualization. This webinar will talk through how and what we are doing to make that possible. Here is the archived recording to watch when you get a chance.

Today, Dell announced the availability of new servers, storage and virtualization solutions for you to offer your customers.

Building on our Efficient Enterprise launch back on March 30th, Dell today announced the expansion from those first five server platforms and the PS6000 Series iSCSI storage array with three more server platforms and the introduction of our new PS4000 Series iSCSI storage array.

Our new Dell EqualLogic PS4000 Series arrays offers all the great features and capabilities of our EqualLogic PS6000 but scaled down so it's in the "sweet-spot" for your small, medium business customer needs or for larger customers looking to compliment their existing PS6000 deployment with a remote, branch office storage array solution.

Meanwhile, our 11^th Generation of PowerEdge servers are joined by the latest additions

• T410 is designed for robust performance and flexibility for growing businesses and remote sites in a tower form factor.
• T710 is designed for high performance and capacity for server consolidation and virtualization in a tower or 5U rack mountable form factor.
• R410 is designed to be the most versatile rack server, with high performance and high value in a compact rack form factor for all business applications.

All three servers offer the industry’s only “instant-on” embedded systems management that simplifies deployment and management while being powered by the new Intel Xeon 5500 Series processors.

Finally, Dell announced a variety of virtualization oriented features, capabilities and enablement deliverables including engineering validated reference architectures. To learn more about these new virtualization, server and storage capabilities please register for either this Friday’s PS4000 Webinar or Monday’s Virtualization webinar called “Dell Virtualization: Simplifying the Path to Profit” for PartnerDirect registered and certified partners.

Update 6-24-08: In this short vlog Sean Phelan of Dell PartnerDirect talks with OuterNet President Dan McDougal about the latest 11G products and services.

Nearly every channel partner wants to sell services along with hardware. In fact, for most partners, services represent 80% - 90% of revenue. So, when Dell Channel held a webinar several weeks ago called “How to generate profitable mobility services,” I was really interested in the subject.

First, let’s define “mobility services.” You might think it just means the deployment of laptops. But if you think about it, the subject covers six key areas:

· Protection: Security around access to the laptop, to the data that is on it, and access behind the firewall.

· Connectivity: Again, most customers might think connectivity means having the latest wireless features. But the complete picture also includes the strategy, design and setup of company wireless networks, improving connectivity, monitoring, and centralized security – all of which can translate to rich services engagements.

· Support: There is a services play here too, and it goes way beyond simple break/fix. Parts, warranty support, replacement, and patching & updating all represent great opportunities.

· Configuration management: With increasing complexity of applications, partner services proving imaging & image management, application distribution, as well as patching and update are a critical need.

· Storage: While it seems funny to talk about storage and laptops in the same sentence, there are several great opportunities here too: Remote backup, centralized storage, archiving and disaster recovery, and of course, additional external hard drives.

· Managed services: This is essentially a combination of all of the components above, and represents perhaps the richest and “stickiest” kind of services engagement.

Naturally, you would want to know what Dell -- along with partners like Intel -- are doing to help its channel partners offer these kinds of services. To find out, look into the information on Dell Remote Management tools here, and see how easy it is to offer these kinds of services. And, if you want training on the tools, (so you can become a Certified Management Services Provider) click here.

My question to channel partners is this: What is the fastest way to become a managed services provider?

As IT spending is in turmoil, the customers of our channel partners do strange things – sometimes including stopping IT spending altogether. So when I read this article in Dell’s Power Solutions Magazine, it really resonated. What channel partners should tell their customers is that the wrong decisions today will plague their IT costs for years to come. So here are the five big ideas

1. Not making the most of what you already have. Transitioning to a virtualized environment using existing systems can be significantly less expensive and more flexible than scaling your hardware infrastructure.

2. Leaving inefficient equipment in place. A major part of most IT budgets goes toward simply keeping the data center running. That’s why energy-efficient features are designed directly into Dell PowerEdge server and blade solutions. Dell channel partners can also help companies optimize the office IT environment through desktop and mobile client power management and efficient desktop computing.

3. Skimping on security and disaster recovery. Safeguarding your systems and preparing for the worst isn’t a big deal—until it is. Don’t get caught rolling the dice: calculate your potential downtime losses, define your recovery objectives, pinpoint your primary risks, and then design and size your disaster recovery systems accordingly.

4. Investing in new projects rather than existing ones. It’s tempting to look at a difficult business climate as a good time to try out completely new strategies. However, continuing to invest in existing projects is more likely to produce long-term gains.

5. Not establishing a social media strategy. Social media is poised to transform marketing and change how employees relate to each other within your company. Making a small investment now can position your company for benefits down the road.

These guys are certainly smarter than me, but I would add a couple more:

6. Maintaining multiple versions of applications, rather than standardizing on just a few.

7. Adding still more storage on to an already tortured & dispersed & non-standardized storage infrastructure, rather than consolidating.

What are your ideas? We’d like to hear them.

Read the full article here.