Dell Channel VP Vitagliano: 'We Essentially Turn Capex Into Opex'

At last week’s #IngramMicro One summit I had the chance to sit down with Frank Vitagliano, #Dell ’s VP of North American Channel Sales. Vitagliano has been in this business a long time, first with #IBM, then #Juniper Networks and now Dell, much of that time with the channel. As a relative newcomer to the space, it was great to get his perspective. For example, Vitagliano says that 70 percent of all the IT products and services delivered in the marketplace go through a solution provider, a number that’s been pretty consistent over the years. He sees plenty of help on the way for providers stuck in the switch to opex spending, and he says Dell and #Microsoft agree: #hybridcloud is the future.

Channel Partners: Will cloud make a dent in channel sales?

Frank Vitagliano: No, and I’ll tell why. Customers still need help relative to cloud and cloud deployment. They need advice: "Help me understand how it works. Help me understand, should it be on-prem? Should it be off-prem? Help me understand what applications or what parts of my business I can comfortably move into a cloud. What are the security requirements?" Which is obviously the biggest deal. They’re going to solution providers every day as trusted advisers, saying, "I need your help." Now the bigger companies, they do some of that on their own, because they have the IT expertise. But a lot of the midrange and below companies, they may go to cloud, but the solution provider’s still in the middle of it, and in many cases building out the platform and supporting it for them.

And, a hybrid model is going to be the norm. Dell World is not just end users or just channel, it’s combined. We had the CEO of Microsoft there, Satya Nadella, and he and Michael [Dell] got up on stage and talked about a number of different things. One of the things he said, was, "Look, if there’s any confusion about whether this is going to be a hybrid environment or not, let me just tell you, surveys have been done fairly recently that said 10 percent of the customers said, 'I won’t put anything out on the cloud.' Ten percent said, 'I’m comfortable putting everything on the cloud.' Which means 80 percent said 'pieces.'" At the end of the day, it’s hybrid. It’s hybrid. And we’re seeing that.{ad}

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