Channel Beat: Dell Bumps Up Channel Numbers, Knocks HP

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Channel Chief Cheryl Cook made headlines this week, kicking off Dell World 2014 in Austin,Texas, with a pledge of $125 million in partner incentives next year.

Cook said channel partners now account for 40 percent of Dell's overall global revenue. Channel business is now reportedly outpacing Dell's direct business. Cook said partners should expect incentives and growth around Dell's storage, data center and PC businesses in 2015.

CEO Michael Dell continued to bad-mouth HP's recent split at the conference, saying the move was for shareholders, not customers. Dell also broadcasted doubts about IBM's ability to be in the end-to-end solutions business. Dell went on to celebrate the company's growth as a private entity over the past year.

In other news, Microsoft and Dropbox are teaming up to allow users to access Dropbox from Office cloud software.

With the partnership, users will be able to access Dropbox from Office mobile apps, edit Office files directly from Dropbox, and sync and share them across devices.

The new features will roll out on software updates to Office and Dropbox on iOS and Android in the next few weeks. The web updates will be released in the first half of 2015.

The partnership strengthens Dropbox's competition against Google, and bolsters Microsoft's offerings to cloud customers.

Sprint plans to cut some 2,000 jobs, a move it announced after releasing huge losses in the second fiscal quarter.

Sprint said the layoffs, its second round of cuts this year, are part of a larger effort to reduce its annual costs by $1.5 billion.

Sprint reported a loss of $765 million in the second quarter, and also lost 272,000 wireless subscribers in the quarter. Sprint, who was acquired by SoftBank last year, continues to face enormous competition from Verizon and AT&T, who are both beating out the carrier in the market.

PUBLISHED NOV. 6, 2014