Dell Technologies On Demand: 10 Things Partners Need To Know

Here are ten things Dell channel partners need to know about the new Dell Technologies On Demand flexible consumption program including a 10 percent upfront margin on deals.

Dell Dives Deep Into Flexible Consumption

The $91-billion infrastructure giant is taking flexible consumption to the next level with its new Dell Technologies On Demand program that the company touts as providing the broadest set of solutions and as-a-service choices on the planet.

“Our offer is the broadest in the industry bar-none,” said Sam Grocott, senior vice president for marketing at Dell Technologies, in an interview with CRN. “It’s the industry’s broadest consumption-based and as-a-service delivery model that is ideally suited for the way on-premise infrastructure and services are consumed today. … Some vendors are addressing only a limited part of the IT ecosystem which actually may introduce more complexity that it resolves. Some are offering a one-size-fits-all approach to as-a-service with very fixed and rigid configurations that restrict the ability to optimize certain workloads. That’s not what we are doing.”

The Round Rock, Texas-based company launched Dell Technologies On Demand on Tuesday that provides three flexible consumption offerings that partners can sell as well as a slew of services and margin opportunities for the channel.

Here are 10 things channel partners need to know about Dell Technologies On Demand.

Dell EMC Portfolio, Including New Integrated VMware Stacks, Included

Dell says the sheer number of products and full-stack hybrid cloud architectures available in Dell Technologies On Demand is a market differentiator. Partners can now sell nearly every Dell product in a consumption-based manner -- from storage, servers, data protection and networking to PCs and gateways. Additionally, Dell is enabling its largest architectures to now be sold as-a-service including its joint VMware stacks Dell Technologies Cloud and Unified Workspace.

“When you bring all of that together, we strongly believe that we now have the industries’ broadest set of full stack portfolio for flexible consumption from the edge – so PC, gateways, etc. – into the core – data protection, storage, servers, networking – and into the cloud with our HCI and PowerOne as well as Dell Technologies Cloud offers,” said Grocott. “So end-to-end, we’re really well positioned to bring the breath of the Dell Technologies portfolio to bear under this new Dell Tech On Demand program.”

On Tuesday, Dell unveiled its new autonomous infrastructure, PowerOne, which is included in the Dell Technologies On Demand program. PowerOne includes all of the company’s flagship server, storage, data protection and networking lines along with VMware vSphere and a new automation engine under a single pane of glass.

Flex On Demand

There are three different consumption and as-a-service offerings available for customers to choose from in Dell Technologies On Demand: Pay As You Grow, Data Center Utility And Flex On Demand.

Dell’s metering-based approach is Flex On Demand, which customers to pay only for the technology needed, while providing access to ready buffer capacity with payments that adjust up and down to match usage. How a solution is specifically metered is based on the technology being consumed.

“So the new introduction of compute, we’re metering at the physical level on the server level on CPU utilization. So depending on how much of the CPU your using within the server, that will determine what you pay for on a monthly basis. If you look at the HCI space, we take a bit of a blended CPU and storage utilization metering approach. So because HCI is the convergence of compute and storage together, we have a blended approach,” said Grocott. “Then in the storage world, it’s the typically capacity metering, so how much storage capacity are you using.”

Data Center Utility

Data Center Utility is another way customers can buy Dell’s technology in the On Demand new program. This consumption-based approach aligns costs directly to usage, allowing customers to maximize scaling flexibility while only paying for what they use.

“Data Center Unity delivers the high degree of customization to address business requirements across the IT ecosystem. Customers can scale up and down as required, capacity is delivered as needed, procurement is streamlined and automated, billing is simplified and reporting is standardized across the board,” said Grocott. “Managed services are often delivered as part of this total solution.”

Through automated monitoring of consumption levels, customers can view capacity requirements and growth expectation. Data Center Utility also allows metering based on the amount of virtual machines (VMs).

“We even offer a logical approach at the VM level with our Data Center Utility services, where you can meter based on the VMs that your using,” Grocott said. “So whether it’s compute, memory, capacity or even at the VM level, we can support metering across the board. We’re extremely glandular in what we offer our partners to then work with customers.”

Pay As You Grow

The third flexible consumption option in the new Dell Technologies On Demand program is Pay As You Grow. This program path enables customers to align payments to their deployment schedules, thus only paying for what they use and when they use it. Dell said Pay As You Grow allows customers to go at their own pace with customized payment solutions to support forecasted growth, flexible deployment schedules, deferrals and pre-provisioned upgrades.

“ Customers want to be able to buy the infrastructure but want to be able to think about it, finance it and consume it as though it was a cloud service,” said Rick Gouin, chief technology officer, at Winslow Technology Group, a Waltham, Mass.-based Dell partner. “So that is the core of what [Dell Technologies On Demand] is addressing which is great news. The closer it gets to a cloud service, the more successful we’ll be.”

10% Upfront Margin

Partners who leverage the Dell Technologies On Demand program can receive a 10 percent upfront transaction fee of the entire deal after its close and the solution has been deployed.

Akanksha Mehrotra, vice president of strategy, planning and operations, who leads Dell Technologies On Demand marketing, said channel partners can choose to receive a 10-percent upfront margin or a resell option depending on how much risk a partner wants to take.

“Let’s assume a partner doesn’t want to take on too much risk. They can go with the upfront option that gives [partners] that referral fee as soon as the deal is closed and infrastructure deployed. That fee is 10 percent of the committed contract value. So they make that margin upfront once the deal is closed and they also still get tier credit and qualify for all of their usual rebates that they would just like any other Capex deal,” said Mehrotra.

Reseller Option

Aside from the upfront 10 percent margin, partners also have a reseller option where solution providers participate in the ongoing revenue and margin earned overtime of the deal.

“In this model, we will ship the infrastructure to the customer, retain ownership, we meter and measure the customer usage and bill them for what they’re looking for on a monthly basis,” Mehrotra said. “The partner executes the agreement with their customers. They can include their value-added services. So we’ll sell it to them at a wholesale rate, they can include their services and whatever else they’d like, then upsell it to make whatever margin. Then they manage that agreement with the customer on a day-to-day basis.”

This reseller option for Dell Technologies On Demand is typically for channel partners who have long term investments in Dell such as Titanium-status partners, according to Mehrotra.

Dell PowerEdge Servers Now Available For Consumption

For the first time ever, Dell is opening up its market-leading PowerEdge servers to be sold in a consumption-based and as-a-service manner through Dell Technologies On Demand. Dell’s PowerEdge servers can now be sold with processor-based usage measurement options for compute at the core which can help reduce costs associated with over-provisioning.

By 2022, 15 percent of new deployments of on-premises computing will involve pay-per-use pricing, up from less than 1 percent in 2019, according to IT research firm Gartner.

“I’m super excited for our business to be able leverage Flex on Demand as it expands to compute and workstations on the server side, that’s really exciting for me,” said Kris Kostiuk, global director, business development, media & entertainment for Toronto-based Scalar, who partners with Dell. “We’ve been asking for years for a mechanism to measure compute on a flexible consumption model. That’s what I’m most excited about is the new compute-based flexible consumption.”

PC as-a-Service For SMBs

Dell Technologies On Demand is also focused on the client side of the house. Although Dell’s PC as-a-Service (PCaaS) has been previously available in consumption-based offerings, the company is now expanding it to include small business, with the ability to offer lifecycle management of hardware, software, services and financing for growing companies in a single, predictable price per seat per month.

“We’ve taken our PC as-a-Service and taken it more down market to target SMB and even down to individual users,” said Dell’s Grocott. “So you can now consume our PC as a Service offer down to the smallest organization or even the individual user.”

Dell And Partner Services Available

With Dell Technologies On Demand, partners can include Dell’s value-added services ProDeploy, ProSupport and Endpoint Infrastructure Managed Services. These can be bundled and paired with all the financial consumption models in the program to provide tailored as-a-service experience.

ProSupport services aims to maximize productivity and uptime with support expertise and insights driven by artificial intelligence. “ProSupport is built on the foundation of AI and machine learning and enables customers to proactively address issues before they impact their business,” said Grocott. ProDeploy deployment services accelerate technology adoption through faster deployment and additional control. Endpoint Infrastructure Managed Services lets Dell manage customer’s end-to-end IT operations to free up resources.

“We let customers choose what type of flexible consumption models they want to do – Flex on Demand, Pay as you Grow, Data Center Utility – matched up with any of our services or any of our channel partners services, then backed by our portfolio,” said Grocott. “You can attach [services] to any product or solution at any consumption model, then the partner can attach their own services and their own capabilities on top of it and present that into a single integrated offer for the end user.”

Dell: No One Can Compete With Us

Dell is more than confident that Dell Technologies On Demand not only offers the most flexible consumption options in the industry, but provides access to the broadest product portfolio as well.

Grocott says competitors who have launched their own compensation and as-a-service delivery options simply cannot compete against what Dell Technologies is providing.

“There’s some vendors who only offer a storage array. They’re a bit of a one-trick pony. Yes, they can offer as-a-service and flexible consumption, but it’s just within a storage array,” said Grocott. “Imagine a world where you have a separate as-a-service consumption plan for your storage system, a separate vendor for compute, a separate for data protection, separate for cloud – think of the massive complexity for customers where they have six or seven different as-a-service contracts across six different vendors. With Dell Technologies, we can offer that full stack experience across the entire continuum all within a single contract and single experience through our partner community. That is a critical advantage that we’re bringing to bear.”