News & Press Releases

“The Dell EMC partner program is a win-win for partners and allows us to continue to focus on growing our business” said Sonia St. Charles, CEO, Davenport Group. “The transparency and accessibility to a host of products and services focused all around the data center allows us to address multiple customer challenges and increases our earning potential with multiple paths to achieve tier status.”

Sonia St. Charles, CEO of Davenport Group, told The VAR Guy the new program lives up to its marketing promises of being simple, predictable and profitable. A Dell partner since 2008, St. Charles said that while the previous Dell program was very robust and generously rewarded sales activity focused on their storage, server and network products, its level of complexity was frustrating. “It was difficult to accurately predict your rebate level,” she said. “Dell EMC did a great job of listening to their channel partners and designing a program that addressed all of our concerns.”

Nevertheless, Dell EMC has included provisions in its program that make it easier for smaller partners to participate at higher levels of the channel program if they sell Dell EMC technologies exclusively. “We were pleasantly surprised by that,” said Sonia St. Charles, CEO of the Davenport Group. “We think there is a huge opportunity for Dell EMC in the market.” READ FULL ARTICLE

Sonia St. Charles, CEO of the Davenport Group, a St. Paul, Minn.-based solution provider that sits on the vendor’s partner advisory board, said she sees only upside to the new program even for smaller partners like Davenport Group. “We hadn’t anticipated that the rebate program would be nearly this rich, and I hadn’t conceived that they’d be able to level the playing field between a company my size and a much larger EMC solution provider,” she said. READ FULL ARTICLE

Sonia St. Charles, CEO of Dell EMC solution provider Davenport Group, St. Paul, Minn., applauded the move to put partners on notice that are not making the grade. That said, she stressed, it must be done fairly. “One of the mistakes companies make is to set out a program and then they don’t stick to the rules,” St. Charles said. “That’s where companies lose their credibility, but if they deem that these criteria are important and they’re going to measure partners against it, that’s a fair move. I do agree with that, as long as it’s fair and equitable. If there’s no way a partner can hit their revenue goal for the full year, that would be a safe measure.” READ FULL ARTICLE

Having a wide range of offerings is important for Dell’s partners as well, said Paul Clifford, president of Davenport Group, a St. Paul, Minn.-based solution provider and long-term Dell partner. This is important as customers are increasingly attracted to the hyper-converged infrastructure solutions, Clifford told CRN. “We have a lot of solutions for our customers,” he said. “One solution, however, is a one-size-fits-all solution. That’s how this business works. But while SMB, mid-size, and enterprise customers all need hyper-converged infrastructure solutions, they have different needs. This just gives us more tools to use to work with customers.” READ FULL ARTICLE

For Davenport, the expanded customer base provides a huge new opportunity, St. Charles said. DMS qualified as a premier Dell partner, but had that status because of all the servers it sold rather than services related to those servers. “Dell needs a strong partner in that area,” she said. “DMS didn’t offer services. They just dropped boxes. They have Fortune 500 accounts and other high-end and mid-market customers. So we see the opportunity to go deeper with these customers.” READ FULL ARTICLE

“We think there’s a very significant play here with regard to Cisco,” St. Charles said. “Cisco has such a large portion of the market, and so many partners are Cisco partners. We think Dell is as good if not better than anything available in the market. Some large data centers are already running on it, and we’re thinking this is an opportunity to really push it.” READ FULL ARTICLE

“I think Dell will provide end-to-end solutions, and will build common IP [intellectual property] across all the product architectures,” St. Charles told CRN. Dell successfully sold both the EqualLogic and Compellent storage lines for years, and can do so with EMC VNX, St. Charles said. READ FULL ARTICLE

“It’s more than just the addition of the G13 servers,” Clifford told CRN. “It’s pushing massive IOPS. The upgraded hardware gives Dell a lot of running room for long-term enhancements. Dell is setting it up for Storage Center 7.0. It will have some [exceptional] features, and will need the extra performance.” With the SC9000, Dell is showing its ability to innovate to make sure customers don’t get left behind, Clifford said. “We’re at that moment in time where the industry is shifting to hybrid flash and all-flash,” he said. “Customers need the IOPS to make it happen, and the SC9000 provides it.” READ FULL ARTICLE

This new flash storage technology in many ways changes everything about storage, said Paul Clifford, president of Davenport Group, a St. Paul, Minn.-based solution provider and longtime Dell partner. “It’s not so much the innovation of the new flash memory,” Clifford said. “It’s the major impact it will have on spinning disks. We’ll be able to get more performance with six of these new SSDs than we get with 72 15,000-rpm hard disks. The way we approach capacity and performance today needs a balancing act between flash and spinning disks. For companies with the money, they’ll do what it takes to get the performance they need. For the rest, they want speed, but are concerned about capacity. The new technology lets us take care of both.” READ FULL ARTICLE

“When Dell talks about working with the channel, we really are the poster child for it,” she said. “The products stand alone. They’ve got the best products on the market today. You can take them to a small customer or to a Fortune 500 company. There’s something for everybody. It’s open and it’s scalable.” READ FULL ARTICLE