Dell Cloud Channel Partner Program Launches

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Dell is looking to the channel to continue growing its vCloud offering. The company officially announced on its blog the formation of the Dell Cloud Channel Partner Program, which gives partners in the Dell PartnerDirect program the ability to resell Dell’s cloud product or act as a referral partner for Dell’s direct salesforce.

It’s good to see Dell work with its channel to bring its cloud offerings to the market. Over the last few years, there has been a lot of talk about how channel and direct salesforces clash at times over cloud offerings, and although this won’t be a pure channel play by Dell, at least Dell is giving a little and working with its channel instead of strictly in conflict with it.

Stephen Spector posted on his Dell blog about the new channel partner program that will provide Dell’s partners with access to vCPUs, memory, storage networks, IP addresses, firewalls, catalog capabilities and additional services around the company’s Dell Cloud with VMware vCloudDatacenter Service. The opportunities are only available to partners in the Dell PartnerDirect program…

According to Spector, there are several reasons why Dell’s partners would be interested in this program. Noting that the public cloud has low barriers to entry for access to IaaS, Spector wrote that partners that take advantage of the opportunity will be able to take VMware bursting capabilities from private to public cloud computing. Existing VMware-based customers will be able to move to the cloud on their own time using vCloudConnector; and they’ll be able to move a single workload or an entire datacenter to the public cloud. Additionally, the service was designed to work with existing VMware deployments. Partners will be able to help customers take their existing VMware-based virtual machines and “run them on a fully compatible external cloud infrastructure without application re-writes.”

This marks the launch of the Dell Cloud Partner Program in the U.S. and Canada, but Dell also has plans to launch the program in Europe.

Dell is going head-to-head against plenty of competitors in the cloud computing space, and the launch of this program puts it in a much better position to expand its presence in the market and get its offerings to end-customers. Other vendors are working with channel partners to rapidly build out their cloud lines of business, and Dell should gain some of those same advantages by working with its PartnerDirect partners.

Although Dell has not always played well with partners, the launch of a cloud partner program — even if might be later than partners would have liked — shows the company does have some commitment to the indirect side of its business. How committed it is to driving cloud services through the channel is anybody’s guess, and Dell will likely be under close scrutiny by its channel over the next several months to see how well it works with — rather than against — its own channel.