“Partnership is about winning together. It’s about win-win. It’s about mutual profitability,” profound words by Richard Lee, Vice President, Global Commercial Channel , APAC as he addressed the crowd of 50 Channel Partners for Dell from India at the recently held Dell India Partner Summit 2013 at the Golden Palms Hotel in Bangalore. The summit organized as a celebration of our successful journey in India with Global Commercial Channel‘s (GCC) over the past two years enabled Channel Partners and the Dell leadership team to network, exchange ideas and share best practices.
The 2-day summit had a host of programs aimed at strengthening Dell’s relationship with its Channel Partners. Day 1 of the program began on a congratulatory note to the Channel Partners by myself and Richard Lee who praised the Channel Partners for their successful contributions over the last financial year to the Dell India and Asia business. Keeping with the theme “Together let’s grow and thrive,” they shared their insights on how as a team they could work together to bring profitability to the Dell business and themselves.
The next set of sessions encapsulated the role of the Channel Partners in the overall Dell strategy. S. Sridhar, Director, Enterprise Solutions Group and Balaji JR, Sr. Marketing Manager were present to give their updates from the Enterprise and Consumer businesses respectively, sharing with Channel Partners their strategies and focus areas for the respective businesses. Nilesh Desai, Director-Sales, Accutech Systems, a Dell Channel Partner present at the event said, “The partner summit has been helpful especially in getting a management perspective of where Dell is headed as a company – something that we don’t usually get an opportunity to see.”
The most awaited program of the summit was the Dell India Partner Awards Nights 2013, organized in an effort to felicitate and recognize Dell’s top performing partners. VSM Technologies bagged the prestigious Partner of the Year award. There were also several other awards distributed at the ceremony including solution specific awards and region specific awards. Praveen Naik who won the award for the Best Upcountry Partner on behalf of his company Veetrag Systems said that the award has “helped strengthen our six year association with Dell and encourage us to continue with this association. Dell’s products have been well-received by our customers in the education and healthcare segment.”
Day 2 of the event provided an opportunity for the partners to engage in one-on-one discussions with the leadership team of Dell. The activity was much appreciated by the channel partners as they could address the problems they faced on-the-ground while selling Dell’s products and solutions and how Dell could help solves these problems. This was followed by an insightful session on the enterprise IT industry by award-winning journalist and Editor-in-chief IDG Group, Mr. Vijay Ramachandran and Partner Sessions by Intel and Microsoft representatives.
There was also a panel discussion consisting of Dell’s acquisition partner where they discussed how Dell’ Products and Solutions portfolio can be strengthened to provide complete satisfaction for their customers to further Dell’s positioning and offerings. The panel consisted of Sanjay Jain, Business Management Development, Dell Software representing Kace, Elavarasu Krishnan, Software Engineer Director, Dell Wyse, India and Amit Singh, Country Head, Dell SonicWALL, India. I advised channel partners to help their customers to “look for outcomes-rather than solutions” in order to set themselves apart, while the panelists gave their insights on how the capabilities of the acquisition partners could be leveraged to their customers.
Here’s an Infographic that illustrates the evolution of the GCC (click on the image to see a larger version of it).
Thank you to our Partners. I’m proud to see what we’ve accomplished together. We’re committed to keeping the Channel business growing strong. Here is to the Partner Summit, a successful financial year for GCC and Dell’s channel partner network.