Dell Technologies recently introduced new enhancements to its partner program, including rebates and incentives to enhance customer outcomes.
Launching in August 2026, the partner program refresh centers on differentiated rebates for strategic solutions; focuses accounts on incentives; and recognizes impact from advisory and systems integrator co-sell.
During Dell Technologies World 2026, Channel Insider spoke with both Darren Sullivan, SVP, Global Partner Revenue Operations, Dell, and Alan Ashby, Sr. Director, Americas Data Center Presales & Specialty Sales, Dell, about the partner program enhancements and what this shift represents.
Why Dell is shifting how it thinks about partner engagement and growth
Ashby and Sullivan both described Dell’s partner program enhancements as part of a broader shift in how Dell identifies partner value, customer engagement, and long-term growth.
Ashby specifically framed the shift as moving away from traditional partner models that primarily reward scale and transactional volume.
He explained that partners deliver substantial customer value through specialized technical skills, even if they’re not the largest revenue-generating organizations within Dell’s ecosystem.
“A lot of legacy partner programs really reward partners for revenue,” Ashby said. “Our program’s shifting to be able to reward partners for their technical skill sets [and] their competencies to help customers through those overall journeys and produce that outcome.”
How smaller and regional partners will benefit from the new program
Ashby also highlighted smaller, specialized, or regional partners as a major focus of the refresh.
“A small regional partner, as an example, may have really great skill sets, and they’ve invested in talent. We want to reward those partners for investing in their talent,” said Ashby. “You look at the results that we’re seeing out of some of those partners that may not be the largest partners, but they have extreme value they can deliver to customers.”
Dell’s direct and channel sales motions combine under broad GTM
Sullivan expanded on this, explaining that the program changes are tied to Dell’s unique go-to-market structure, combining one of the industry’s largest direct sales organizations with a broad global partner ecosystem.
According to Sullivan, Dell’s goal is not simply to generate more overlap between its sellers and partners but to create greater market reach, broader customer penetration, and more efficient collaboration.
“Our go-to-market model is different from every other competitor that we compete against. We have a robust partner ecosystem, in which we work hard to have a competitive, profitable program for partners, but we also have a direct sales force,” said Sullivan. “The combination of the two are the largest go-to-market engines in the industry.”
The importance of limiting overlap
Sullivan described Dell’s route-to-market model as a Venn diagram in which Dell sellers and partners naturally overlap on opportunities, but too much overlap becomes operationally inefficient and financially untenable.
“If that overlap is too much, then it’s not a profitable approach, right? Because you’re paying at a competitive level in the partner program, but then you’re also staffing more sales resources than anybody else,” said Sullivan. “Therefore, the Venn diagram has to kind of separate a little bit and get much more reach and scale.”
This helped shape Dell’s strategy, which is intended to guide partners’ activity toward areas where Dell most needs partner-led expansion.
Sullivan also notes that Dell expects partners to operationalize these incentives internally by aligning their account intelligence and sales motions with Dell’s strategic priorities.
Together, both Sullivan and Ashby portrayed the partner program refresh not as a narrow rebate adjustment, but as a broader repositioning of Dell’s ecosystem around expertise, strategic growth areas, AI transformation, and long-term customer engagement.
AI, infrastructure modernization, and the expanding opportunity for partners
Another major theme from these conversations was that AI and the transformation of modern infrastructure are reshaping both Dell’s product strategy and the role partners play in customer engagements.
Ashby and Sullivan both described AI as a catalyst that is accelerating the need for consultative selling, deeper technical specialization, and long-term services opportunities.
“The world of the data center is evolving extremely fast … helping customers through those journeys requires a skill set – a different individual to help through that,” said Ashby. “Different partners, different sizes will have that opportunity to help us through that journey.”
How the channel can leverage Dell to build AI practices
Ashby also noted that many partners are now actively building AI-focused practices by investing in new talent, retraining teams, and developing consultative capabilities around AI deployment and operations.
Sullivan explained that products such as PowerStore, Dell Private Cloud, and Dell’s AI infrastructure offerings were prioritized for modernization because they directly support the workloads and strategic outcomes that Dell believes will define future enterprise environments.
Ashby noted AI enablement for small- and mid-size organizations as a particularly strong opening for partners, as those customers may have simpler environments and more accessible datasets.
“There’s a really unique opportunity in the smaller customers where data may be less messy, and maybe easier to be able to organize and be able to show proof of concept in a more simplified motion,” said Ashby.
Data center demand opens new opportunities in modernization and cost reduction
Dell’s newer server and data protection technologies create opportunities for partners to help customers reduce costs, consolidate environments, and modernize aging data center operations. Security and cyber resilience were also positioned as rapidly growing opportunities for partners.
“There’s really never been a better time to have those discussions, especially where a lot of our customers are concerned around the cost increases of all the componentry,” said Ashby. “We have a great solution for customers around data security, and I just think it’s one of the biggest opportunities for Dell as well as our partners.”
Sullivan tied these opportunities back to Dell’s broader AI-native vision, arguing that partners must evolve operationally and strategically to remain competitive.
“Partners need to position themselves as leaders who can help their customers transform their businesses to become native AI companies,” noted Sullivan. “Partners who figure that out both internally for themselves and how they help their customers, they’re going to be the ones that thrive in the next five years.”
Simplifying collaboration and creating an AI-native operating model
Dell has made efforts to simplify and modernize the operational side of its partner ecosystem.
Both Ashby and Sullivan described Dell as undergoing a large-scale internal transformation aimed at reducing complexity, improving collaboration, and rebuilding foundational systems to support an AI-first future.
Ashby emphasized how the new Dell partner platform and tooling improvements are designed to streamline collaboration between Dell sellers and partners.
“Some of the things that we’ve announced and that we’re rolling out is around better collaboration with the new modern Dell partner platform, which by default enables better collaboration with our Dell sellers inherently,” Ashby explained. “That collaboration motion is much more streamlined and more efficient than it’s ever been.”
Sullivan offered more details about the reasoning behind Dell’s broader operational overhaul, explaining that over decades of acquisitions, product expansions, and go-to-market changes, Dell has accumulated layers of processes and policies that created unnecessary complexity for partners.
“The feedback that we’ve gotten the most over the years is that we need to simplify the experience of our partnership,” Sullivan noted. “Each decision on their own were good decisions, but you start to layer those on over many, many years, you create a really complex operating group.”
Partner and customer data optimization work key to future growth
Sullivan detailed that Dell leadership recognized that modern AI capabilities could not simply be layered onto fragmented data and inconsistent processes.
That realization led to a company-wide effort centered around a new internal philosophy: You have to simplify and standardize before you can automate.
According to Sullivan, Dell spent the last 18 months rebuilding foundational systems, data layers, and operational workflows to support future AI-driven operations.
“The work that we’ve done over the last 18 months has been getting at the root of that. Rebuilding the data layer, the customer data, product data, the partner data, and rebuilding that in a clean, connected end-to-end structure for the company to share,” said Sullivan.
Sullivan placed these changes into three core goals that Dell is pursuing with its partner ecosystem transformation:
- Generating higher-quality demand signals
- Improving collaboration between sellers and partners
- Increasing transaction speed and efficiency
The AI-native companies of the future
Both Sullivan and Ashby framed the operational transformation as inseparable from Dell’s larger AI strategy. Sullivan said Dell is intentionally rebuilding itself to become an “AI-native company” and expects partners to make similar transformations.
“There was a recognition at the executive level in the company and at a board level that we had to rebuild how we run the company to build a foundation for a native AI company in the future,” said Sullivan. “We wanted to be that company that essentially disrupted ourselves.”
Ashby expressed similar optimism on the long-term direction of the company and its partner ecosystem.
“Our product portfolio has never been better. Our partner program’s never been better. We’ve re-energized the entire sales force. We rebuilt the entire Dell company to be AI-first,” said Ashby.
“We’re incredibly invested in that relationship with our partners. And really, the opportunity is extremely bright for all of us.”
