Michael Dell On Double-Digit Channel Growth In Year One Of Dell Technologies, The Rise Of AI, And The Partner Opportunity In Pivotal Container Service

It's been a year since Dell closed the landmark $58 billion acquisition of data storage giant EMC, and Chairman and CEO Michael Dell says the combined company is growing beyond expectations and focused on taking share from the competition. "We had about $2 billion more revenue than we planned for, and a lot of it was in the revenue synergies across Dell Technologies," Dell said. To maintain that pace, the Round Rock, Texas, company is relying on its $35 billion channel business, and its ability to sell a broad portfolio of products and services to customers looking to buy more solutions from fewer vendors. Dell said a significant part of the growth the company has seen since the acquisition is from storage partners selling servers to their customers. The time has come, as well, for solution providers to begin pushing into new technologies like #artificialintelligence and #containers, #Dell said. #PivotalContainerService, a partnership between #Pivotal, #VMware and #GoogleCloud, was introduced at the recent VMWorld conference, and Dell said traditional virtualization partners will have to get into the container business to remain relevant in the market. "It is going very well, but we have a saying around here when things are going well," Dell said. "It's PBNS, pleased but never satisfied. It's all about continuous improvement and doing more." What follows is an edited excerpt of CRN's conversation with Dell
It's been a year since you completed the acquisition of EMC. Are you seeing what you'd like to see as far as cross-selling opportunities for the channel?

It is going very well, but we have a saying around here when things are going well: It's PBNS, pleased but never satisfied. It's all about continuous improvement and doing more. There are more opportunities, more share to gain. We've never been more relevant than we are now in terms of the big things that are happening with our customers, the digital transformation, the IT transformation, the workforce, the security transformation. Those are the big four that we consistently talk about. These are the things we're engaged with with partners. The level of excitement, engagement; we've got a $35 billion channel program. Last week I was in Europe and met with lots of partners, our distributors; they're totally engaged and activated. We had double-digit growth in the first half with channel partners, and for a business of our size that's extraordinary.

Are you getting what you need from partners as far as cross-selling the Dell Technologies portfolio is concerned?

When you look at it from the overall Dell Technologies level, we had a pretty aggressive plan, and for the first half of the year, we had about $2 billion more revenue than we planned for, and a lot of it was in the revenue synergies across Dell Technologies. What I've seen more broadly is a portfolio effect. In any one of the different areas, whether it's unstructured data, all flash, high end, midrange storage, servers, workstations, commercial PCs, virtualization, software-defined, networking, security, mobility management, Platform-as-a-Service, on and on, we're number one. There's a portfolio effect, which is to say that when a decision-maker looks at the total portfolio, they say I'm going to bet on you guys, I'm not going to bet on the other guys. A large portion of that growth we're seeing – the double-digit growth in the first half with the channel – is share shift against some of the others, and there's a lot more where that came from, so we're excited.

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