Channelsales Worldwide

You have to admire Dell; they’ve been the poster child for the direct-sales only model since their beginnings.  2 years ago, Michael, the Board and a handful of execs embarked on radical approach to add the channel to their sales and delivery model.  Everyone was skeptical to pull this off on a large scale:  analysts, investors, employees and most importantly, IT solutions partners.

Well, fast forward 2 years and Dell has made some progress.  Dell reported today that has lowered its registration fee from $50k to $15k for partners; this is a remarkable step. http://tinyurl.com/ycwsc5m It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it is.  It means that Dell has committed to use (new) tracking systems that on the direct side didn’t exist before; not just systems, but new policies to incentivize and monitor sales rep behavior, really, the whole go-to-market model.

In August, Channelweb reported at its annual conference in Washington DC, Xchange 09, that Dell was making positive and significant progress to creating and managing an effective, global standards channel program

But the animosity and skepticism of the channel vs. Dell is real and was readily apparent at Xchange.  When Dell’s Channel VP, Greg Davis got up to make his keynote speech, my immediate reaction was to make sure my program guide could be used as battlefield armor as I felt sure there was going to be a fiery exchange.  I was not disappointed.

In fact, I was quite worried when Greg opened up the discussion for channel partners to ask questions (which they did, in numbers).  I really admired Greg for getting up there and taking this heat.  His peers from Cisco, HP, Juniper, all of whom had spoken  the prior 2 days had a cake walk with Partner of the Year trophies, fancy videos, lots of laughs and enjoying advantage of their channel success.    Greg really had a tough draw to speak after all of that fun stuff and just before lunch on the last day.

The tension in the crowd was palpable; I was expecting a few tomatoes from that mornings breakfast buffet to go flying; seriously, I really thought it might come to blows.  But Greg took the heat graciously and sincerely.  He talked about how Dell is ‘walking the talk’:  sales reps that don’t follow new indirect policies are put on a performance plans and in fact have been fired for protecting direct deals.  Dell is serious about the channel.  They still have a lot of work to do but I concluded that they couldn’t remake the eggs they broke with a direct-model only and so instead, are putting together the ingredients to make a fine omelet.

As Dell moves more heavily into the Data Center, I think they realized that they couldn’t go anywhere without partners; so they had to unbreak some more eggs and make a omelets that is going to take several years before it is ready.

And what is happening with the large ISVs, SaaS and channel partners?  Traditionally, the large software companies have thrived with their complex, on-premise solutions that lead to mutual washing of the hands, with their long time companions, on premise SIs.  But now with SaaS, how do these large ISVs ‘break’ the eggs with their, almost in bred channel partners, SIs?

Large ISVs players are adding robust SaaS applications as I write this.  Just look at SAP, SAP Business Objects, Informatica (Ok, Salesforce fans they are behind but they are catching up).

I’m ravished and I can’t wait to see the recipe that the large ISVs are  creating to co-opt their on –premise SI partners, come SaaS ‘delivery’ partners.  It’s going to be a great brunch to enjoy when  ISVs follow Dell’s path to break some eggs and create a SI-base frittata for their SaaS solutions.