Dell EMC-VMware Integration Paying Off In Big Channel Sales Gains

VirtuIT Systems President Michael Murphy is seeing big sales gains as a result of the increasingly tight engineering integration between Dell EMC and VMware offerings.

In fact, Murphy, a longtime Dell partner based in Nanuet, N.Y., said VirtuIT’s Dell EMC networking business is up 200 percent, while his storage sales are up as much as 40 percent as a result of the Dell EMC-VMware collaboration.

“The key for us to being successful is to be that bridge for Dell EMC and VMware,” said Murphy. “We bring everything together so that the customer sees us as the means to the end to get them on their way to digital transformation.”

Murphy isn’t alone. Other Dell partners are also seeing big sales gains as a result of the breakthroughs in product simplicity and price/performance from the Dell EMC and VMware engineering teams working side by side.

Technology collaboration between the two companies this year is set to “accelerate” across a wide variety of areas ranging from client and desktop offerings to storage and networking, said Tom Sweet, executive vice president and CFO at Dell.

“You look at the number of solution workstreams that we have going right now with VMware—whether it’s around hyperconverged infrastructure or Workspace ONE in our client space or around what we’re doing with vSAN and vSAN Ready Nodes—so across the spectrum you’re going to see us accelerate a number of these integrated solutions. We’re optimistic and excited about it,” said Sweet. “VMware is a great platform in the market in terms of their position in virtualized infrastructure, but you also think about what they’re doing with VMware’s NSX and the network, we have a lot of activity going on in the networking space. It’s pretty exciting times.”

Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, president and general manager of Dell EMC’s Server and Infrastructure Systems, said working hand in hand with VMware’s engineering and development teams has given Dell EMC what he calls a “complete advantage” to drive technology differentiation in the intensely competitive hyper-converged market.

“Under the Dell Technologies umbrella, what we’re able to put together is really co-engineering with VMware,” he said. “We have a combined team. It’s not a Dell EMC or a VMware team. It is a combined team.”

That means top engineers from both companies are “dedicated to the task of building the best hyper-converged infrastructure operating system and appliance,” said Gorakhpurwalla.

“We gained incredible scale through our PowerEdge [server] business that allows us to unlock different levels of technology, but most importantly, we opened up one more level of deep integrated engineering because now we own everything—all the way from the silicon, fiberglass and sheet metal, all the way up to the cloud,” said Gorakhpurwalla.

Another significant channel benefit from the tighter relationship is that VMware channel reps and account managers are now working alongside Dell EMC’s channel teams.

“The VMware reps are in the same field offices as the Dell guys,” said Murphy. “One of the first questions we’re now asking our sales team is, ‘Who is the VMware rep? If you don’t know the VMware rep, then you’re not doing the right activities in terms of sales.’”

The stepped-up 2019 Dell EMC-VMware integration offensive comes on the heels of a blizzard of product integrations including Dell Provisioning for VMware’s Workspace ONE, which enables automatic device setup and extends the efficiencies of cloud management. In addition, Dell’s VxRack hyper-converged system now integrates with updated versions of VMware’s Cloud Foundation, NSX and vRealize Suite, as well as with VMware’s multi-cloud Software-as-a-Service solution, VMware Cloud Assembly.

Looking ahead, Gorakhpurwalla said if VMware has a technology on its road map, you can bet that it will be on the Dell EMC road map as well.

“We have a commitment that when VMware offers a feature, a capability, we already know about it—we’ve already tested it and we’ll make it available to partners and customers within that month,” Gorakhpurwalla said. “If they release an express patch to a major release, we’ll be there at the same time because we’re co-engineering and customers are asking us to be able to provide the quickest time to market with these value-added features.”