Dell Teases New Consumption- Based Pricing Offering For Partners

With consumption-based selling becoming more prevalent in the IT landscape, Dell Technologies is set to make a splash in the market during this year’s highly anticipated Dell Technologies World.

“As we know, consumption models are here to stay,” said Joyce Mullen, Dell EMC’s channel chief, and president of global channel, OEM and IoT, in an interview with CRN. “As we introduce our new cloud strategy, cloud offers, improved consumption capability and improved offers around that—including offers for partners—it’s part of what we’re building. We’re listening to our customers and we’re listening to our partners. They’re asking for more of this. We have to figure out how to deliver some more of that.”

Mullen said although Dell Financial Services is being leveraged by 2,000 partners worldwide and has a whopping $9.7 billion worth of assets under management, more consumption-based capabilities for the channel are on the way.

“As part of that cloud strategy, we have an incredible Dell Financial Services engine, but consumption models are not just about financing. So we’re trying to figure out how to beef up our capabilities there,” said Mullen. “We’ll have some more details at Dell Technologies World, but it’s not all done yet.”

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Dell has been looking into Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s highly successful consumption-based pay-per-use HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity model for partners, according to Mullen. HPE’s software-based GreenLake is an on-premises consumption model that is growing at a 300 percent rate in the channel.

“We’ve done a bunch of work to try to asses, ‘What is GreenLake? What do partners like about it? What do they not like about it?’” Mullen said.

Robert Keblusek, CTO of Sentinel Technologies, a Downers Grove, Ill.-based Dell Technologies partner, said the channel would welcome new consumption-based offerings from the $91 billion Round Rock, Texas-based infrastructure giant. “[Consumption-based offerings] are a great services opportunity and a great support opportunity for partners,” he said.

Keblusek said Sentinel has created life-cycle services for customers around consumption-based selling. “We’re saying, ‘What’s the business value out of this consumption-based model?’ That’s what we have a big focus on today,” he said.

Keblusek said he was glad when Dell extended its Flex On Demand offering into hyper-converged infrastructure, which he describes as more of a cloud consumption model for Infrastructure as a Service. Flex On Demand, which is part of Dell Financial Services, allows customers to scale up or down their payments of capacity based on usage. “I’m very interested to see what they’ll be announcing around new consumption offerings,” Keblusek said.

Dell Technologies World takes place from April 29 to May 2 in Las Vegas.

Regarding major announcements and themes at Dell Technologies World, Mullen said, “You’re going to hear more about cloud, more about consumption and more about how Dell and VMware are going to be working more closely together.”