Dell's Channel Sales Booming With Enterprise Customers

"From a channel standpoint, it was another strong quarter in Q3," said Greg Davis, Dell's vice president and general manager, global commercial channels. "There was good business driven by strong enterprise sales in servers, storage and networking."

Dell on Thursday reported solid quarterly revenue growth, with nearly 150 percent growth in earnings. For its 2011 third fiscal third quarter, which ended October 29, Dell reported revenue of $15.4 billion, up about 19 percent from the $12.9 billion the company reported for its 2010 third fiscal quarter.

Server revenue through Dell's National Alliance partners, comprised of its certified partners as well as some large VARs who aren't certified, increased 50 percent while server unit sales increased 29 percent, Davis said. Storage sales increased around 30 percent while networking sales were up more than 100 percent coming off a small base in the year-ago quarter. Dell launched its networking certification earlier this year to drive growth in that area, said Paul Shaffer, worldwide channel marketing director at Dell.

"We're excited to sell the right enterprise products, but we're very excited about the types of server and storage products, higher-end servers and storage to and through our partners," Davis said.

In the U.S., Dell has surpassed 1,000 certified partners, Davis said.

"We'll continue to recruit more but what's exciting is that we've delivered 42,000 training courses this year to partners. They've taken a lot of training and we need and want to continue to add training and curriculum," Davis said.

"Our growth is driven in a couple of different ways. We're really disciplined around our [channel] program and benefits. We've been executing the points we committed to. We continue to run deal registration and more partners are using that," Davis said.

In the third quarter, Dell approved 73 percent of 11,700 deal registration applications, compared to about 70 percent of 7,181 submissions in the year-ago quarter, Shaffer said.

"It's been pretty consistent [in the percentage of deals registered]. The highest percentage of [rejected deal registrations] is because of incomplete data or they didn't meet the minimum threshold," Shaffer said.

Looking forward, Dell seeks to increase the number of certified partners, particularly as it expands the certification program to areas such as systems management, thanks in large part to Dell's acquisition of Kace earlier this year, Davis said.

Dell grandfathered in 12 Kace partners into its systems management certification and since then has certified 44 more and has another 40 in the pipeline, Davis said.

"That's one of more exciting areas right now. I don't go to a partner event and not hear or say that there's not a more complete business offering than investing in a training certification on Kace," Davis said.