10 Important Ways a Now-Private Dell Inc. Is Changing
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Channel Sales Are Up
Dell said the channel now accounts for 40% of revenue. The company compensates its salesforce for deals fulfilled through the channel; it also sees a higher attach rate of products per transaction sold through the channel. -
Channel Investments Increase
Dell aims to reduce sales cycle times and is investing millions to beef up its internal IT systems and provide additional tools for lead management, deal registration, training and certification that will all be mobile-enabled. -
Alliances With Distribution
Dell has put aside its historic aversion to distribution. The company is being brought into more deals than ever, thanks to solution providers aligned with Ingram Micro, Tech Data and Synnex. -
Dell Emerging as a Cloud Broker
The new Dell Cloud Marketplace is now in beta. Dell plans to resell a broad range of cloud services in 2015 via the marketplace. -
Dell Gains Data Center Share
Dell was the only major vendor to generate year-over-year growth in both rack and blade servers. The company claimed to be the top storage supplier in the first half of 2014 based on total terabytes sold for internal and external storage. -
Dell Makes Software Advances
The channel now accounts for 60% of global software revenue. Dell Software registered double-digit revenue growth year-over-year. -
Dell PC Business Posts Gains
The PC business just recorded its seventh consecutive quarter of year-over-year gains in global market share. Dell's U.S. PC share is now 24%, a 3.1-percentage-point increase from last year. In the last quarter, Dell grew PC shipments by nearly 10%. -
Pricing Strategy Gets More Aggressive
In the absence of quarterly revenue and margin targets from Wall Street, Dell is more aggressive on pricing. Dell admits to aggressively pricing products in certain categories in order to gain share. -
Networking Is the Next Big Opportunity
Dell aims to expand its networking reach via a mix of open standards, off-the-shelf hardware, OS choices and new technologies such as software-defined networking and network virtualization. Additionally, Dell forged partnerships with a variety of third parties to resell networking software. -
Investments in Innovation
Investments in R&D are starting to bear fruit. The latest PowerEdge FX converged system—which offers flexibility in hardware and software and enable users to customize them to their workloads—presents challenges to Cisco and Hewlett-Packard.
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Why Metrics Matter to the Channel NEWS ANALYSIS: Since becoming a private company in October 2013, Dell Inc. has been investing heavily in the channel while, at the same time, becoming much more aggressive when it comes to pricing. The result seems to be marked gains in just about every product category in which Dell participates. Naturally, the channel is playing a big role in that strategy. Indirect sales through the channel now account for 40 percent of the company's revenue, and company officials said they see no top limit to that growth. Much of that success can be attributed to changes in the way Dell compensates its own salespeople for deals sold through the channel and the fact that, through alliances with distributors, Dell is now being asked to bid on more potential deals than ever. How sustainable that strategy may be over the long haul remains to be seen, however. For now, though, Dell is certainly a force to be reckoned with—both inside and outside the channel—not only because of pricing, but also due to the company's investments in new products and services that are expected to bear fruit in 2015.