A tete-e-tete

What does Compellent Technologies

acquisition mean for Dell?


The acquisition is the next step in

Dell's strategy to help customers better manage their data growth,

reduce their storage costs and simplify the management of their IT

infrastructure. The opportunity to acquire Compellent complements our

strategic acquisitions of EqualLogic, Scalent, Ocarina and Exanet by

extending Dell's key intelligent infrastructure tenants of

automation, optimization, scalability and virtualization Compellent's

100 percent channel

focus provides Dell's PartnerDirect Channel Partners with a new set

of storage products to sell. As a result, Dell will be able to

provide customers with new storage choices and an alternative to

legacy non-virtualized arrays.


In addition to iSCSI, Compellent's

multi-protocol architecture includes Fibre Channel, and FCoE for

customers that continue to leverage Fibre Channel for their storage

network. There is a large Fibre Channel install base and Compellent

is a solution that enables Dell to provide FC capabilities in line

with our vision. Also, Compellent delivers the lowest total cost of

ownership in the industry — slashing the time and cost of storage

up to 80 percent.

There has already been competition

in the storage domain in India. What are your immediate priorities?


Dell is expanding its storage

technology portfolio to better address the needs of its customers in

the virtual era and that is our foremost priority. The volume,

velocity and value of customers data is creating a need to change the

way they manage people, processes and procurement. In the virtual era,

customers manage

rapidly changing workloads and require storage that can keep up with

dynamic requirements, solve the TCO equation, and automate the

set-up, deployment and management of their IT environments.


Dell's enterprise strategy in the

virtual era helps control operational costs while making it easier to

keep up with growing business, competitive and market demands without

sacrificing choice and flexibility. Our intelligent infrastructure

solutions, including servers, storage and networking, provide

advanced automation, industry-leading optimization and flexibility

through scalable storage solutions.

What will be your market strategy

and partner-driven initiatives?


Storage offers some of the biggest

opportunities for business growth in the IT market and we believe we

could help our partners become more profitable through a sustained

understanding of storage solutions-selling. As organizations

understand the importance of data management and increase their

investments in implementing storage solutions, Dell's comprehensive

portfolio of offerings offers a tremendous opportunity in the

marketplace.

The primary objective of our channel

program is to deepen our engagement with Enterprise partners and

there is a significant Dell investment of money and resources for

this purpose. The thrust is on solution selling and partners are

being enabled with demo units apart from technical trainings. We have

employed various means to reach out to our partners and have tried to

gather feedback and suggestion from them. We have gone ahead and

committed ourselves to a lot of initiatives that our partners wanted

us to invest our resources on. The changes made to our Partner Portal

is a case in point wherein we have taken these ideas and implemented

to make the Partner Portal more user friendly and have included a lot

of tools our partners would find useful.

Highlighting the initiatives taken for

channel engagement, the EQL demo program is currently on wherein the

product is discounted heavily to encourage partners to purchase the

EQL box. We are also investing heavily in building skill-sets of

relevant partners, including sending key partners to Kuala Lumpur in

Malaysia for a three day intensive training program on Storage. We

are aligning instructor led classroom training programs and extending

online courses to cover more relevant areas. Incentive plans are being

aligned

accordingly with much higher incentives for both the partner

organization and partner sales representatives for selling enterprise

solutions. There are specific incentive programs on qualified lead

generation and closure on EqualLogic and joint lead-gen events in

partnership with Microsoft and VMWare to generate virtualization led

storage deals. Instead of adding new partners, Dell has focused in

growing the base of certified partners which has grown by 30 percent

(number of EA certified partners). ESG business through partners has

grown at the rate of almost 20 percent QoQ. In fact, currently,

approx. 76 percent of deals coming in are getting approved for the

partners. Dell is educating and certifying

partners to be able to better engage with SMBs in India. Dell

launched the PartnerDirect program to create value for resellers to

reach out to more customers. The PartnerDirect program has helped us

make the Dell brand available to the SMB segment which does a

significant part of its business through the channel.

Will this acquisition intensify the

competition around virtualization? Please share some insight.


Compellent helps customers capitalize

on the 'Virtual Era' by reducing data management costs and

streamlining operations significantly. It delivers the lowest total

cost of ownership in the industry — slashing the time and cost of

storage up to 80 percent. By entering into a definitive agreement to

acquire Compellent, Dell further edges towards becoming the most

formidable player in the storage arena.