Partners: Dell Technologies, Salesforce Partnership Could Smooth Deal Reg Rough Spots

Dell Technologies' latest strategic partnership with Salesforce could go a long way toward relieving deal registration difficulties that have bedeviled Dell partners in the past.

The move essentially puts Dell Technologies salespeople and partners on a single, unified CRM platform, and partners anticipate that the system could significantly reduce friction in the deal registration process, particularly for solution providers that don’t currently use a CRM tool.

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Mark McKeever, partner at Tempe, Ariz.-based solution provider MicroAge, said that while it remains to be seen whether the strategy will improve deal registration specifically, it does show Dell Technologies' understanding of customers' move toward an efficient, standardized approach to dealing with vendors and partners.

"It definitely speaks to the importance of the digitization in businesses where technology is used to bring standardization of process across organizations," McKeever said. "Well-thought-out process standardization enables organizations to generate greater speed as information more readily flows from person to person. There's certainly a lot of potential here if it's implemented well."

Dell Technologies and Salesforce announced the new strategic agreement last week. Dell has been using Salesforce for more than 10 years. The new arrangement gives Dell Technologies' nearly 200,000 channel partners, as well as its 40,000 salespeople, access to Salesforce's market-leading customer relationship management [CRM] platform, as well as its sales, service and marketing applications.

Dell Technologies says the agreement means the company will be able to provide customer service more efficiently. Dell EMC's Boomi cloud orchestration platform will handle the data moving between Dell Technologies and Salesforce. The CRM strategy also fits neatly with a recent multi-year agreement for Salesforce to use Dell EMC data center infrastructure, as well as Dell laptops.

In a recent interview with CNBC, Dell Technologies Chairman and CEO Michael Dell noted that the Salesforce strategy will help tie together the businesses under the Dell Technologies umbrella. He also underlined the fact that "[Salesforce CEO] Marc [Benioff] is building a cloud, largely powered by Dell Technologies."

The market for CRM software has been growing at a double-digit pace in the last five years, according to statistics from research firm Gartner Inc. Gartner predicts CRM will be a $37 billion market by the end of this year. The market is dominated by Salesforce, which booked more than $10 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year and commands a nearly 20 percent market share, according to Gartner. Other players in the market include SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and Adobe.