Dell Wants To Leverage Storage VARs To Sell More Servers

"Historically, we haven't had a lot of PowerEdge and PowerVault servers in the channel. The goal is to increase that mix. Here's where the notion of solutions becomes more important. Rather than training channel partners to be server resellers or storage resellers, make that a natural selling solution. It gets you more share of a customer's wallet," Asthana said.

The natural leverage point for VARs to expand beyond selling one product category is virtualization, Asthana said.

"If you look at server virtualization, a customer wants consulting services, they want deployed virtualization. But if you deploy virtualization, it has a big impact on the rest of the solution. Storage may not work as well. Applications may not work as well. Licensing strategies may need to change. Networking may need to change," Asthana said. "Here's a great opportunity for our channel partners to go into a customer and say, 'Let me show you benefits of virtualization, not just servers and storage.'"

In the last few years, Dell has acquired several companies to bolster its virtualization solutions, including EqualLogic, Compellent and Force 10 Networks. With each of those came a ready-made base of channel partners. Now that those companies have been integrated into Dell, the time to start cross-selling and up-selling servers is now, Asthana said.

"We have very thoughtful solutions for virtualization. We believe we have partners we can leverage [to sell servers]. That will be a good strategy to drive more Dell through them," Asthana said. "Some resellers are storage specific. Others may have had server relationships with another company. Our goal is to show them the benefits of a server relationship with us."

Several Dell executives have noted in the last couple years that Dell's server marketshare in the U.S. is more than 30 percent, yet the number of servers sold through solution providers is a single-digit percentage of Dell's overall total sold.

"The two angles we have on that are to talk about the synergy between Dell servers and storage, especially around virtualization and other application areas," Asthana siad. "If you have multiple points coming from Dell, you have a better solution. Second, if you have a good relationship with us on storage, let's expand on that because as you aggregate more product sales it's easier to go to a [higher] partnership status."