CRN Exclusive: Dell's Haas On Creating A Tech Industry Powerhouse, Melding Channel Progams And Sales Organizations

Haas On The Record

The $67 billion acquisition of data storage giant EMC makes Dell an enterprise computing powerhouse ready to seize share in a fast-growing market, Marius Haas, Dell's chief commercial officer and president of Dell Enterprise Solutions, told CRN Monday.

There's still a lot of work to do to bring together Dell and EMC's partner ecosystems, but Haas said the partners that will have the most success are those that can be collaborative and gain complete knowledge of the entire portfolio.

Here's what Haas had to say in an exclusive interview with CRN.

How does Dell view the new enterprise IT order? What's your position in it?

We clearly see it as a combination that will be an entity that is an industry leader in the highest growth areas of a $2 trillion enterprise market with products and solutions that can expand through compute, storage, cloud, security and mobility. We'll be driving greater virtualization, and all solution sets customers expect their vendors to deliver. We believe this creates a powerhouse of a combination, and we're excited about the ability to serve a broad set of customers with a broad set of solutions.

What are the most significant synergies of the merger?

One, it's the unbelievable portfolio of technology and intellectual property that comes together to solve an end-to-end business problem for customers in traditional and new IT. Two, EMC has a world-class sales organization, and Dell has a world-class midmarket sales organization. Put those two teams working hand-in-glove, and we're going to be a powerhouse in the market.

What's your message to partners, both Dell and EMC?

This is an acceleration of the path we've been on. We've had tremendous receptivity and excitement. We're already getting notes from partners saying they're excited about two prominent brands in the data center coming together.

How will Dell bring together its partner ecosystem and EMC's?

There's a lot of work yet to be done, but we're going to design what is best for our customers and partners. The businesses are hugely complementary, and I think if we work hard and listen to our partners, we deliver what's important to them.

What do you want to see from partners as a result of this merger?

What we've found is that partners that engage, and engage all the way down to the territory and account level, are the most successful, and we expect them to continue to do that. They need a good solid understanding of how the portfolio addresses business problems. We have a lot of collaboration with partners, and we're excited about where it's going.

How does this affect both your partnerships, and competition with Cisco and other vendors?

For us, what's important is doing what's best for customers. They are the key, so the last thing we're going to do is disrupt what our partners have adopted. They are still strong partners, strong technology relationships.