Dell Chief Partner Officer Millard: ‘Immense’ Opportunity In 2025, But ‘Can’t Do It Without Partners’
‘When we think about 2025, the opportunity is immense. And as I said before, I think the role that our partners are going to play is pretty exciting,’ Dell Chief Partner Officer Denise Millard tells CRN.
Dell Chief Partner Officer Denise Millard told CRN the combination of its new incentives and partner-focused go-to market strategies is going to drive growth and profitability, while helping win new business in 2025.
“We just had a discussion with our [Partner Advisory Board] members. They’re excited about what’s coming, and I think we’re going to get a ton of traction with the growth program, plus the Partner First for Storage strategy, plus the Compete Select Program,” she told CRN. “We’re essentially putting a very large focus on accounts where we’ll drive new business for Dell, and we’re doing that by aligning our core sellers to be incentivized to go after those accounts, and our partners to go after those accounts. So we’re both aligned and focused on going to grow and win in the market.”
As analysts forecast growth in PCs amid an expected refresh, as well as a boom in data center infrastructure spending amid the deals unveiled in 2025, Millard called the opportunity “immense” and said Dell can’t do it alone.
“We know we have the largest go-to-market engine in the industry. More and more of the areas that Dell is playing in require an ecosystem, and we can’t do it without partners,” she told CRN in a recent interview. “Partners at this point are still contributing approximately 50 percent of Dell’s net revenue over the past four quarters. So it’s a great time to be a partner with Dell Technologies and to be part of the partner ecosystem inside of Dell.”
Todd Johnson, president of Dell Platinum partner Avalon Technologies of Bloomfield Hills, Mich. said new incentive structures such as Compete Select Dell has put a framework around its drive for partners to capture new lines of business within in existing accounts.
“They've made it really beneficial for partners to do everything possible to go in and win that business. So they definitely put the right incentives to scale out their data center business. But instead of it being a green field account, it's accounts that have some kind of penetration rate in them, so you're in the door,” he told CRN in a call this week. “It's just being more strategic in selling the value and understanding what customers trying to accomplish, and then bringing the right technology to do it. So I'm really thrilled with the changes they made to it.”
Even in end-to-end AI deployments where Dell can deliver a rack-scale turnkey product that combines its PowerEdge servers, storage, as well as networking for training and inferencing large language models, Dell needs partners who can help support the customer’s investment, Millard said.
“I don’t think we’re to the point where this is transactional,” she said. “I think this is much more consultative and advisory-led. So those partners that already had data practices, it is just a natural extension of what they were already doing.”
[RELATED: Dell Gives Partners Bigger Incentives On Networking, Storage, PCs, And Winning New Customers]
For the year ahead, she said partners will see incentives across Dell’s entire product line that are designed to fuel growth and profitability.
“We’re excited about the 2025 program,” she told CRN. “This is going to be a year of growth. That is going to be the theme word for probably all of our conversations throughout the year. We want to work with our partners to continue to take share and do that at pace.”
Darren Sullivan, Dell’s senior vice president of global partner program and operations, told CRN that under the new partner program Dell will keep its growth incentives for PCs, which include a 1.5 percent rebate back to dollar one when partners hit their quarterly client target. Meanwhile, Titanium partners will get a 2 percent growth incentive when they hit quarterly goals.
“We’ve always had a focus around growth with a particular focus on new business acquisition, and that will continue,” he said. “But these incentives are designed to reward partners across their entire business, not just new business acquisition. So it should really help us drive joint plans together to grow collectively.”
When it comes to winning new accounts, Sullivan said Dell has rolled out a rebate called Compete Select focused on larger, underpenetrated end-user accounts, allowing more of those to qualify for incentives.
“So when partners win new business with Dell in storage, data protection or client, in these accounts they’ll earn an incremental 4 percent rebate, which is stackable on the growth incentive that Titanium partners can earn,” he told CRN.
This is part of Dell’s approach to be simple, predictable and profitable in the channel as it looks to capture a massive spend in the year ahead, Millard said. As of its more recent earnings in November, Dell server sales have shown six consecutive quarters of sequential growth and four consecutive quarters of year-over-year growth.
At a December financial analyst event, Dell President of Infrastructure Solutions Group Arthur Lewis said aside from AI, for 2025 he is most excited to be “getting back to gaining share in storage. Full stop.”
Dell PowerScale F710 and PowerScale F910 grew revenue by double digits in Dell’s third quarter. Dell’s all-flash business in the unstructured space also grew by double digits last quarter. Its software-defined for structured databases PowerFlex also grew by double digits.
“The market forecast is for it to grow about 4 percent next year. And we said on earnings that we would grow at a premium to market and gain share in storage,” Lewis said during the presentation. “And why do we believe we’re going to continue to gain share? We’re very focused on customer use cases and how we think about modern data centers.”
Above the storage layer, Dell said it is building a Dell Data Lakehouse for Meta data management, while its teams are focused on delivering Project Lightning, which is Dell’s parallel file system, in the first half of next year.
Dell recently launched the first of its 17th generation of servers with more coming later in the year, and it sees an opportunity to upgrade what is currently installed to newer products.
“There’s still a significant install base that’s 14th-generation server and older, and we’ve come off a sort of elongated period of digestion,” Lewis said at the financial analyst event. “So it was ripe for refresh. And we kind of said it coming into the year that this would be a server-led refresh, and it’s playing out the way we thought it would.”
Millard told CRN that with the investments that Dell is making and the demand in the marketplace for its products, the key will be driving consistency and profitability to partners.
“There’s never been a better time to be working with our partner community, to innovate and collaborate,” she told CRN. “We really take the feedback from our partners seriously, and we’ve made a number of enhancements to tools and processes to just improve the way in which we’re working with our partners so that we are simple and we are predictable and we are driving profitability and ease of doing business. That is front and center for all of us.”
Here is more of what Millard had to say in her interview with CRN.
Can you give readers a wrap-up of 2024, catch me up to speed, if you will?
I feel like 2024 was a year of doubling down on our partners. Our motto of being simple, predictable, profitable has never been more true. As you know, we launched the Partner First for Storage strategy, really with the intent of driving predictability and collaboration.
We see that working extremely well, and it’s bringing our teams together much more closely in terms of how they’re working with the partners in the field, which is really the outcome we were looking for.
We’ve expanded our Partner of Record program to cover all lines of business. So again, in that predictability column that’s really important to partners, and it’s important to us. If you recall at Dell Tech World, we launched PowerStore Prime, and that was the first real big launch from a product perspective that was aimed directly at our partner community.
And we spent the whole second half of the year on a big road show, really focused on enabling our partners around our midrange storage. And obviously, we’re in the quiet period. I can't talk about results, but our first three quarters this year, we had really strong growth. We also talked about the AI-focused partner network and helping our partners to really build out meaningful AI practices. I think we’ve made a lot of progress there in our partnerships with Nvidia and AMD, but also just in our overall approach to enabling our partner community to deliver AI outcomes,
Then in Q4, I know we briefly talked about this, we launched our biggest investment ever in our client business, and we launched the client growth incentive for our Titanium partners.
Where does Dell see opportunity for partners in 2025?
When we think about 2025, the opportunity is immense. And as I said before, I think the role that our partners are going to play is pretty exciting.
What we’re asking of our partners in the areas that we’re going to really lean in on, it’s going to be in three areas: modern workplace, especially with the PC refresh; modern data center, especially with customers looking for optionality and choice and investment protection; and then, of course, AI.
We’re going to underpin all of that with having really clear requirements for our program, making sure our sellers understand how to engage partners and the value of engaging partners.
And then we’re going to continue to reward our partners for growing and winning new business, and we’ll talk a little bit about the program changes that we’re driving in those areas.
As it relates to workforce transformation and modernization, obviously what’s going to underpin that is the PC refresh cycle that is happening as we speak.
And just to give you a stat, 400 million PCs are running Windows 10, and Windows 10 will no longer be supported at the end of this year. Actually, I think it’s October. It goes end of life.
So customers are going to have to make a choice, either pay the additional support per device or they’re going to have to refresh. A big part of the modernization effort there is going to come through the channel. So huge, huge opportunity there.
Dell, as you know, we just completely simplified our portfolio on the client side, and we’re making it simpler for customers to consume. But that also is going to translate into how our partners can represent what Dell brings to the table. So a much simpler portfolio. We can talk more about that in a second.
Then we added silicon diversity by expanding beyond Intel. Last year, we had announced Qualcomm for AI-enabled PCs, and we’ve just expanded to include AMD. So when you think about the lineup of the PC refresh, what’s happening with Windows 10, and then our ability to address all aspects of the market with silicon diversity, I feel like we’re putting our sellers and our partners in just a great position.
Storage is always such a big focus, can you talk about what’s going on there from a channel perspective?
When you talk about storage, a big part of that conversation is customers are looking to take cost out. They’re looking to modernize. They’re looking to consolidate.
We’re seeing tremendous growth through Q3 on our server portfolio. I’ll talk about AI here in a second, but it’s really about how do you future-proof and create this open ecosystem and choice for customers? And that’s what the Dell storage portfolio has always enabled.
And so with PowerStore, we’re seeing tremendous traction through the channel and with the Partner First for Storage strategy. We’re continuing to drive predictability and collaboration, and you’re going to hear about some of the additional incentives that we’re going to put in place for the new fiscal that we’re really excited about.
Where do partners fit in when you’re delivering a turnkey solution into the data center that has Dell services wrapped around it? Can you talk a little bit more about how the partners find their advantage there?
We’re kind of at a tipping point right where a lot of customers have been dabbling and doing proofs of concept, but now they’re going to shift to they need to deploy.
That deployment of shifting to an on-prem solution, they’re doing that because of sovereignty, data risk and compliance. They’re trying to get their arms around their data landscape.
So when you look at the opportunity for partners, if you think about data privacy and security, they’re right in the middle of that with cloud. This just extends to AI.
When you think about the ecosystem play, data center providers plus our CSPs plus our channel partners are coming together to deliver outcomes with key ISVs, and I think it represents just a huge opportunity.
Customers want a point of view. So not every partner has developed an AI practice, but for those that are making those really big investments, they’re going in and having workshops with customers, and they’re creating assessment services, which is looking at their data structures,but also just looking at what are the outcomes that they’re trying to deliver?
And then coming out of those workshops, it drives to a POC, which many of our top partners have stood up Dell AI factories, and they’re using POCs to drive outcomes for a customer. And then, of course, once they transition to ‘build and deploy,’ and in a lot of cases, ‘manage,’ they can handle that end to end.
Now today, Dell is doing the deployments for AI. But if you look at [Dell Vice President Of Global Partner Marketing] Eric [Arcese’s] talk track with you, he was saying that up front customers are looking for a trusted adviser. They’re looking for somebody to come in and give the point of view around how they’re going to kind of navigate deploying AI. They’re looking for these partners to build their ecosystem.
So which partners are they leaning on from an ISV perspective to deliver the outcome? And then post-deployment they’re looking for, ‘Did I get that outcome?’ from a validate-the-value perspective.
We’re seeing tremendous growth through our partners around AI solutions. We’re seeing the number of enterprise customers deploying start to ramp up. And the pipeline is really strong here. A lot of this too is being done in conjunction with with Nvidia, and that will extend to AMD.
But I’d say there is a maturity curve. This is happening so quickly. These guys are making big investments, and there’s a lot of services to wrap around delivering these outcomes. So I think there’s no shortage of opportunity. That’s how I think about it, and those are the conversations that we’re having with our partners.
I think you have to break the partner ecosystem into a couple of pieces.
So I’m going to take our systems integrators and advisories first. And I know that may not be our focus, but they’re often sitting at the tip of the spear in these conversations.
You have board-level discussions happening at many customers, who are saying we need an AI strategy. We’ve got to drive productivity. We’ve got to take cost out. So that’s leading to a lot of the advisories winning major transformation projects inside customers. Because they’re the trusted adviser.
Because of the complexity here, they don’t have all those skills. So they may partner with an integrator, or they may partner with a channel partner who’s moved up the stack to be an integrator.
So WWT [World Wide Technologies] would be a good example. SHI, Insight [Enterprises], Computacenter. Many of these partners are essentially systems integrators, and they have a data practice that is blooming into an AI practice, and they’re making investments.
This is complex. It is a heavy investment on behalf of the partners. I don’t think we’re to the point where this is transactional. I think this is much more consultative and advisory-led. So those partners that already had data practices, it is just a natural extension of what they were already doing.
Really, you know whether it’s PC, whether it’s data center, every forecast is calling for larger and bigger amounts of money being spent on technology in 2025, and Dell obviously has products across all those lines. So what do you tell partners about how they can best position their shops to capture that spend?
I think it goes back to the beginning where, first of all, partners are going to try to maximize where they have core expertise that they can bring to the market.
And let me just start with modernization of the data center. There is a huge opportunity for all the reasons we know: power, cooling, energy costs, consolidations, customers rethinking their cloud strategy.
That’s all creating opportunity and that is in all segments of the market. And so having something like Partner First for Storage underpins our ability to have our teams collaborate and engage with partners. And I think that represents just a huge opportunity for all of us, especially with the adoption we’ve seen with PowerStore,
The other piece, there are three things. It’s going to be based on where their strengths are. Workforce transformation, massive opportunity. If you’re focused there, you’re all in on your Microsoft relationship, Windows 10, and having the right device portfolio to solve customers’ problems.
If you’re focused on the data center, which many of our largest partners are, they’re excited. We just had a discussion with our PAB [Partner Advisory Board] members. They’re excited about what’s coming, and I think we’re going to get a ton of traction with the growth program, plus the Partner First for Storage strategy, plus the Compete Select Program.
We’re essentially putting a very large focus on accounts, where we’ll drive new business for Dell, and we’re doing that by aligning our core sellers to be incentivized to go after those accounts, and our partners to go after those accounts. So we’re both aligned and focused on going to grow and win in the market.
