Michael Dell: The Channel Is Becoming More Important In Hybrid Cloud Era

@MichaelDell sees the channel playing a more prominent role in the future – even as cloud services reshape the competitive landscape. The first #Dell #EMC World conference in Austin this week will be for many partners the first opportunity to learn about the newborn $74 billion IT conglomerate's developing channel vision.  In a recent interview with CRN, Dell, the founder, chairman and CEO of his namesake company, said it's clear that as the industry and the portfolio it offers evolve, the role of channel partners will also evolve and become bigger and more important. "These solutions require a fair amount of expertise, and partners play a big role in that, in applying these solutions," Dell told CRN. "When you think about the role of a partner today, the winning partners are always evolving their capabilities to be contemporary and relevant. Whether it’s intelligence, Internet of things, data science, converged and hyper-converged infrastructure, software-defined data center, security – all the things to address the digital transformation and the challenges end customer have – successful partners are the ones that figure out how to evolve with the changing requirements." The vote of confidence in the channel signals Dell's intention to bet big on its partners. The company got out of the gate fast on the day its landmark acquisition of EMC was finalized by grandfathering EMC partners into the Dell channel program. Michael Tanenhaus, president of Mavenspire, an Annapolis, Maryland-based solution provider that works with Dell EMC, said that while the information Dell EMC has shared about changes to its program is encouraging, the conference is likely to be a real coming-out party.

http://m.crn.com/news/cloud/300082447/michael-dell-the-channel-is-becoming-more-important-in-hybrid-cloud-era.htm

Go Big, Win Big: Dell Technologies And Its Partners Gear Up For Growth

The seeds of the biggest merger in the history of IT were sown in a friendship that began 22 years ago between @MichaelDell and @JoeTucci.

"I've known Joe since 1994 -- way before he went to #EMC," said #DellTechnologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, recalling the start of the relationship with former EMC president and CEO Tucci that has forever changed the enterprise IT landscape.

"He's been a great friend and somebody I've always trusted and admired. He continues to help me and the company. He's just a great person."

The creation of Dell Technologies -- a $74 billion global IT powerhouse and the largest privately held technology firm in the world -- was a long time coming, a process that can be traced back to the turn of the millennium, Michael Dell said.

In 2001, EMC and Dell created an alliance that would last 10 years. Then, in 2009 toward the end of that partnership, members of the boards of Dell and EMC met to discuss a possible merger that failed, at that time, to materialize. Later, in 2014, Michael Dell placed a fateful phone call to his friend Tucci that ultimately led to the close on Sept. 7 of Dell's $58 billion acquisition of EMC.

"How did I feel on Sept. 7? Tremendously excited. Magically energized," Dell said. "What we're doing is epic, it's legendary. Having said all that, it doesn't happen all by itself. We have a lot of work to do, and it's just the very first day of our new company. We're humbled by the responsibility that we have to customers, to our partners, to our 140,000 team members we have in the company. When you think about the world impact the company has, we're humbled by that. We're very energized by what we're doing."

What Dell is doing is creating a global IT conglomerate that stitches together Dell and its family of companies with EMC and the businesses that made up its "Federation," including virtualization kingpin VMware, RSA, Pivotal and Virtustream, not to mention converged and hyper-converged infrastructure powerhouse VCE.

Under the Dell Technologies umbrella, the PC, or "client" business is known simply as Dell while the enterprise business is called Dell EMC.

The blockbuster merger is a flag in the ground for Michael Dell's vision of what his company should be: a global IT firm that is both large and nimble and can take advantage of its scale to provide products and services from the individual consumer to the very largest data centers in the world, all while maintaining its commitment to innovation. Dell, who started the company that bears his name from a dorm room at the University of Texas in 1984, hasn't been shy about the company's "Go Big, Win Big" mantra.

That vision runs counter to that of key competitors, namely Hewlett-Packard, which took the opposite approach when it split into two separate companies last year: HP Inc., the company that sells PCs and printers, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), which sells enterprise infrastructure.

http://m.crn.com/news/data-center/300082445/go-big-win-big-dell-technologies-and-its-partners-gear-up-for-growth.htm