Dell-EMC Deal: Dell Partners Eager For Larger Portfolio, Integration Opportunities

Dell partners said they are eager to get access to the large portfolio of products that will be available through Dell's planned acquisition of EMC. They also said they are looking forward to doing business with a privately held EMC and taking advantage of the built-in integration opportunities they expect will come.

And although many important questions remain, partners at the annual Dell World conference held this week in Austin, Texas, said they were optimistic about the prospects ahead and happy that top Dell executives were willing to share some information about the deal and its potential effects on the channel.

"We assumed that it was front and center, the first question we were going to get anyway, so we might as well go after it," Marius Haas, Dell chief commercial officer and president of enterprise operations, told CRN about senior executives' willingness to discuss the pending transaction.

[Related: CRN Dell World Exclusive: Dell's Cook Details 11 Big Partner Program Moves]

Partners who spoke with CRN said they appreciated the executives' openness given the fact that the deal isn't expected to close until at least the middle of next year.

"They've been very transparent, and reasonably not scripted," said Paul Clemmons, principal at Deloitte Digital. "It's really helpful to hear the nuance in [founder and CEO Michael Dell's] description of what's going to happen with EMC."

In presentations throughout the conference, Dell executives, including Michael Dell, shared broad, overarching integration strategies with partners and customers. They noted that they intend to integrate EMC quickly, taking advantage of complementary product lines in storage, cloud, converged infrastructure, virtualization, security and big data.

Jason Myers, a regional director for FusionStorm, a top partner of both Dell and EMC, said he's particularly looking forward to EMC becoming a private company under Dell ownership. He said he hopes that move has the same impact on EMC's sales culture that it did on Dell's when it went private a little more than two years ago.

"[Going private has made] the experience of doing business with Dell much more enjoyable. It's changed the way Dell sells its products, and it changed the way Dell relates to its partners," Myers said.

Myers said that as a large partner with Dell and EMC, FusionStorm has a leg up when it comes to integrating the companies' technologies. In fact, the solution provider already does a significant amount of integration work between Dell, EMC and VMware, he said.

Dell partners who have not worked with EMC in the past said they are looking forward to having a wider swath of potential customers.

The acquisition will give Dell partners access to a wider range of customers than in the past, said Scott Winslow, president of Boston-based solution provider Winslow Technology Group.

"We thought about becoming an EMC partner in the past, but didn't want to do it because we want to play nice with Dell," he said. "Now we will get access to EMC. I talked to a couple of Fortune 5000 insurance customers last week. They want to do more with us, but they felt we didn't have the portfolio they need."

The acquisition will position Dell as the world technology leader, said Patrick Mulvee, partner at Sidepath, an Irvine, Calif.-based Dell partner, who thinks his business is well-positioned to make hay with the new Dell-EMC combination.

"Our business, our value, is around engineering," said Mulvee. "We're excited about leveraging our existing relationships with customers, and building new ones. Many of our engineers in their past lives implemented EMC technology, including people from past EMC partners like Stack and MTI, and from end users."

JOSEPH F. KOVAR contributed to this story.

PUBLISHED OCT. 23, 2015