Dell Partners Get 20 Points Upfront For PowerStore, PowerScale

‘It allows us to be more competitive if we’re in there against Pure Storage or HPE or NetApp, it makes the deal more competitive from the get-go without having to go back and forward for additional approvals,’ says Josh Lee, director of sales at VirtuIT Systems.

Dell Technologies North American sales leader John Byrne wants to dominate the midrange storage market and make partners more profitable than ever by significantly boosting upfront incentives for partners selling Dell’s PowerStore and PowerScale products.

“We’re going to provide our partners selling PowerStore 20 points on the front-end,” said Byrne, president of North America Sales at Dell, in an interview with CRN. “We already have this lucrative back-end incentive on PowerStore, so now you also have a very lucrative front-end. As we are gaining momentum, we also want to add our PowerScale portfolio including Isilon. It’s stackable. So we have our back-end rebate, new front-end points, then you add all of the tech refreshes, competitive swaps, etc. -- we think our partners are super excited. It will only help accelerate what is happening with their business.”

Dell partners selling PowerStore or PowerScale storage with approved deal registration will get a new front-end discount, aimed at providing an average of 20 points in addition to standard eligible storage and acquisition back-end rebates. Partners are free to set their own resell pricing.

[Related: Dell, HPE, Nutanix Fight For Hyperconverged Lead In HCI Market]

Josh Lee, director of sales at VirtuIT Systems, a Nanuet, N.Y.-based Dell Technologies Titanium partner, said Dell’s push to drive PowerStore and PowerScale profitability and customer wins is giving the channel a leg-up over the competition.

“It allows us to be more competitive if we’re in there against Pure Storage or HPE or NetApp. It makes the deal more competitive from the get-go without having to go back and forward for additional approvals,” said Lee. “It helps us get business done quicker without having to go back and forth for special pricing on some of these competitive opportunities. At the end of the day, it’s going to help us win more deals and win deals faster which is more profitable for everybody.”

In November, Dell began providing partners with a 20 percent margin on PowerStore deals. Byrne (pictured above) said partners can now receive 20 points upfront in addition to all Dell’s incentives already in place.

“We just want our partners to get even more,” said Byrne. “In terms of PowerStore, midrange is the heart of the market. It’s 50 percent [of the total market]. Now we have this world-class PowerStore product that is a great offering that we believe is the No. 1 product in the marketplace.”

Dell is the midrange storage market leader in North America with approximately 29 percent share, according to Byrne. “We’re No. 1 by far versus our closest competitors. We’ve driven significant new customers into our business through the channel. We want to do more for our partners,” he said. “We want continue to excel our 29 percent in the midrange. We’re seeing this acceleration of data. The transformation journey is here right now.”

Launched in 2020, PowerStore is Dell’s midrange all-flash storage platform that is a scale-up, scale-out container-based architecture with built-in future-proof technology to address the challenges of an ever-increasing number of workloads. With built-in machine learning and automation, PowerStore aims to streamline application development and reduce deployment time from days to seconds with VMware integration and support for orchestration frameworks such as Ansible, VMware vRealize Orchestrator and Kubernetes. PowerStore also contains Dell’s container-based software architecture, PowerStoreOS, as well as Dell EMC’s CloudIQ, which provides proactive monitoring and predictive analytics inside PowerStore.

In Dell’s recent fourth fiscal quarter earnings report, the company reported an 8 percent year-over-year increase in its midrange storage business thanks to PowerStore, representing the first time Dell has grown midrange sales in nine quarters.

“It’s all on the back of PowerStore,” said Jeff Clarke, chief operating officer and vice chairman of Dell Technologies during the company’s earnings report in late February. “PowerStore orders grew 4x compared to the third quarter orders as customers embrace the next generation of modern data center technology and applications.”

Approximately 20 percent of PowerStore customers were new to Dell’s storage business “as we tripled the number of wins against key competitors quarter-over-quarter,” Clarke said. “PowerStore is ramping faster than XtremIO and VxRail, making it the fastest new architecture we have released.”

VirtuIT’s Lee said customers have been bullish about PowerStore as pipeline continues to grow, in part, thanks to the lucrative storage discounts Dell has been offering over the past several months.

“We have a good number of PowerStore deals in the pipeline line,” said VirtuIT’s Lee. “With a lot of the discounts that’s been happening since the beginning of Dell’s fiscal year, we’ve been moving them up in the pipeline. … This has been the top focus from our channel team and the segment teams the last two months is: PowerStore, PowerStore and PowerStore. Dell is putting their money where their mouth is.”

Additionally in 2020, the Round Rock, Texas-based $94 billion company launched PowerScale to replace the company’s highly popular Isilon storage line to create a new industry standard for how businesses capture and capitalize on unstructured data.

“For us, we’re all-in on the channel. We want to win the data enter with our channel partners,” said Byrne. “We have the broadest portfolio on the planet. Whether you want to talk about client, server, hyperconverged, core storage, primary storage, backup, or virtualization – we want partners to win and make money. … This is why we rolled out this new program [for PowerStore and PowerScale], to encourage partners to do even more with us.”