Dell Chief Partner Officer Denise Millard told CRN the combination of its new incentives and partner-focused go-to market strategies is going to drive growth and profitability, while helping win new business in 2025.
“We just had a discussion with our [Partner Advisory Board] members. They’re excited about what’s coming, and I think we’re going to get a ton of traction with the growth program, plus the Partner First for Storage strategy, plus the Compete Select Program,” she told CRN. “We’re essentially putting a very large focus on accounts where we’ll drive new business for Dell, and we’re doing that by aligning our core sellers to be incentivized to go after those accounts, and our partners to go after those accounts. So we’re both aligned and focused on going to grow and win in the market.”
As analysts forecast growth in PCs amid an expected refresh, as well as a boom in data center infrastructure spending amid the deals unveiled in 2025, Millard called the opportunity “immense” and said Dell can’t do it alone.
“We know we have the largest go-to-market engine in the industry. More and more of the areas that Dell is playing in require an ecosystem, and we can’t do it without partners,” she told CRN in a recent interview. “Partners at this point are still contributing approximately 50 percent of Dell’s net revenue over the past four quarters. So it’s a great time to be a partner with Dell Technologies and to be part of the partner ecosystem inside of Dell.”
Todd Johnson, president of Dell Platinum partner Avalon Technologies of Bloomfield Hills, Mich. said new incentive structures such as Compete Select Dell has put a framework around its drive for partners to capture new lines of business within in existing accounts.
“They’ve made it really beneficial for partners to do everything possible to go in and win that business. So they definitely put the right incentives to scale out their data center business. But instead of it being a green field account, it’s accounts that have some kind of penetration rate in them, so you’re in the door,” he told CRN in a call this week. “It’s just being more strategic in selling the value and understanding what customers trying to accomplish, and then bringing the right technology to do it. So I’m really thrilled with the changes they made to it.”
Even in end-to-end AI deployments where Dell can deliver a rack-scale turnkey product that combines its PowerEdge servers, storage, as well as networking for training and inferencing large language models, Dell needs partners who can help support the customer’s investment, Millard said.
“I don’t think we’re to the point where this is transactional,” she said. “I think this is much more consultative and advisory-led. So those partners that already had data practices, it is just a natural extension of what they were already doing.”
[RELATED: Dell Gives Partners Bigger Incentives On Networking, Storage, PCs, And Winning New Customers]
For the year ahead, she said partners will see incentives across Dell’s entire product line that are designed to fuel growth and profitability.
“We’re excited about the 2025 program,” she told CRN. “This is going to be a year of growth. That is going to be the theme word for probably all of our conversations throughout the year. We want to work with our partners to continue to take share and do that at pace.”
Darren Sullivan, Dell’s senior vice president of global partner program and operations, told CRN that under the new partner program Dell will keep its growth incentives for PCs, which include a 1.5 percent rebate back to dollar one when partners hit their quarterly client target. Meanwhile, Titanium partners will get a 2 percent growth incentive when they hit quarterly goals.
“We’ve always had a focus around growth with a particular focus on new business acquisition, and that will continue,” he said. “But these incentives are designed to reward partners across their entire business, not just new business acquisition. So it should really help us drive joint plans together to grow collectively.”
When it comes to winning new accounts, Sullivan said Dell has rolled out a rebate called Compete Select focused on larger, underpenetrated end-user accounts, allowing more of those to qualify for incentives.
“So when partners win new business with Dell in storage, data protection or client, in these accounts they’ll earn an incremental 4 percent rebate, which is stackable on the growth incentive that Titanium partners can earn,” he told CRN.
This is part of Dell’s approach to be simple, predictable and profitable in the channel as it looks to capture a massive spend in the year ahead, Millard said. As of its more recent earnings in November, Dell server sales have shown six consecutive quarters of sequential growth and four consecutive quarters of year-over-year growth.
At a December financial analyst event, Dell President of Infrastructure Solutions Group Arthur Lewis said aside from AI, for 2025 he is most excited to be “getting back to gaining share in storage. Full stop.”
Dell PowerScale F710 and PowerScale F910 grew revenue by double digits in Dell’s third quarter. Dell’s all-flash business in the unstructured space also grew by double digits last quarter. Its software-defined for structured databases PowerFlex also grew by double digits.
“The market forecast is for it to grow about 4 percent next year. And we said on earnings that we would grow at a premium to market and gain share in storage,” Lewis said during the presentation. “And why do we believe we’re going to continue to gain share? We’re very focused on customer use cases and how we think about modern data centers.”
Above the storage layer, Dell said it is building a Dell Data Lakehouse for Meta data management, while its teams are focused on delivering Project Lightning, which is Dell’s parallel file system, in the first half of next year.
Dell recently launched the first of its 17th generation of servers with more coming later in the year, and it sees an opportunity to upgrade what is currently installed to newer products.
“There’s still a significant install base that’s 14th-generation server and older, and we’ve come off a sort of elongated period of digestion,” Lewis said at the financial analyst event. “So it was ripe for refresh. And we kind of said it coming into the year that this would be a server-led refresh, and it’s playing out the way we thought it would.”
Millard told CRN that with the investments that Dell is making and the demand in the marketplace for its products, the key will be driving consistency and profitability to partners.
“There’s never been a better time to be working with our partner community, to innovate and collaborate,” she told CRN. “We really take the feedback from our partners seriously, and we’ve made a number of enhancements to tools and processes to just improve the way in which we’re working with our partners so that we are simple and we are predictable and we are driving profitability and ease of doing business. That is front and center for all of us.”