Dell North America President Kyle Leciejewski On Why Dell Is ‘Uniquely Executing’ With Partners In Midst Of Supply Chain Crisis

Leciejewski says the ‘sense of urgency’ from customers to move quickly to capture a competitive advantage by leveraging the power of AI has ‘never been greater.’

Dell Technologies North America President Kyle Leciejewski said the infrastructure powerhouse is “uniquely executing” and “differentiating” itself in a “big way” as it works with partners to provide “continuity” and “predictability of supply” in the current supply chain crisis environment.

With Dell Technologies sales through the North America partner channel up double digits in the last fiscal year, Leciejewski said the $113.5 billion company’s size and scale and its culture of doing what it says it is going to do is paying off for Dell and its partner ecosystem.

“We’ve got this go-to-market relationship where we’ve got the reach and the scale, both from Dell as a company but also from our ecosystem and channel partners that can go out and work with customers to actually take the Dell Technologies product and AI] innovation and make it real,” he said. “Then in this market we are providing continuity of supply, predictability of supply and the ability to deliver on these outcomes. Dell is differentiating in a big way. I think what differentiates us is the say-do mentality of we deliver when we say we’re going to deliver. We execute with these channel partners in these solution areas for our customers.”

Overall, Dell United States accounted for $63.14 billion in revenue in the last fiscal year, up 24 percent from $51.01 billion in the year-ago period.

Leciejewski, a 20-year Dell veteran who has received plaudits from partners for working hand in hand with them to close deals, said customers are looking for “fewer strategic partners that can be more meaningful and more credible” as they grapple with everything from AI to multi-cloud to cyber resiliency and modern workplace. He said Dell shows up best when it is able to show the breadth and depth of its portfolio with “the leading ecosystem we have in the channel” staying focused on customer outcomes.

“Those ultimately become really unique differentiators, and they’re durable differentiators,” he said. “It’s hard to copy that. I think when you pair that up with the predictability in the supply chain and the scale of the global services reach we have, then Dell is one of one. We’re really, really uniquely positioned. That has sort of been the plot. I think that will continue to be the plot. I think consistency here is actually a pretty good call out.”

Leciejewski, who has worked with partners throughout his career including a stint helping build out solution provider CDW’s EMC business, said the “sense of urgency” from customers to move quickly to capture a competitive advantage by leveraging the power of AI has “never been greater.” In addition, he said the opportunity for partners to work with Dell to deliver AI solutions to customers is “massive.”

In fact, Leciejewski said partners are needed to develop AI use cases that drive competitive advantages for customers.

“Our partner opportunity here is immense to close the gap between ‘I want to do AI’ and ‘This is how I’m going to do AI,’” he said. “As partners develop use cases and as they figure out where to apply AI in their businesses, the partner opportunity for services, for consultancy, for insight is massive. This [AI revolution] is going to redefine most businesses, and the first movers will be rewarded.”

Leciejewski said now is the time for partners to step up and help customers map out their AI journey. “I think the channel partners have got this awesome opportunity to spend more and more time with customers, redefining their road maps, building the AI use cases, mapping it to their [customers’] business outcomes. It’s just great to see the ecosystem come together that way,” he said.

Leciejewski’s comments came in an interview at Dell Technologies World, where the company unleashed a new wave of innovation for partners to sell, including Deskside agentic AI solutions; the 18th generation PowerEdge servers; and a new PowerElite storage offering.

Here is more of CRN’s discussion with Leciejewski.

What’s it been like working at Dell leading the North America business?

It has been awesome. I’ve been with the company 20 years. I grew up with the channel. I’ve known a lot of these partners for many, many years. North America is the biggest market. It’s sort of our competitive proving ground. It’s where we have got to show up ready and confident to work.

I think that the general sense of urgency right now from customers is probably higher than it’s ever been, whether it’s the innovation that’s happening around AI or the opportunity to modernize around multi-cloud or the opportunities around cyber resilience and cyber recovery. Those are all coming through in a big way. On the AI front, I think you heard it a lot in the keynotes. People are kind of through the experimentation phase. [Dell founder, Chairman and CEO Michael [Dell] said AI has left the screen and it’s very much showing up in the real world.

I think our partner opportunity here is immense to close the gap between ‘I want to do AI’ and ‘This is how I’m going to do AI.’ As partners develop use cases and as they figure out where to apply AI in their businesses, the partner opportunity for services, for consultancy, for insight, is massive. This is going to redefine most businesses. And the first movers will be rewarded. I think the channel partners have got this awesome opportunity to spend more and more time with customers, redefining their road maps, building the AI use cases, mapping it to business outcomes. It’s just great to see the ecosystem come together that way.

What’s your call to action for partners in terms of how to align with the Dell North America sales team?

We saw double-digit growth in our channel business last year for North America. We did great. We announced a whole host of new innovations [at Dell Technologies World]. So the innovation train from a Dell point of view is not slowing down, whether it’s the new 18th generation PowerEdge [servers] or the things we did with PowerStore Elite that help the channel partners go after the multi-cloud opportunity. Then there is how we’re integrating a lot of the new Exascale storage and the GPU opportunity in the next rev of the Dell AI Factory [with Nvidia] architecture. I also love the opportunities that we have around data protection with Power Protect One.

We have got an innovation vector on almost every one of these dynamics. So there’s no shortage of opportunities for our channel partners to engage with their customer base to talk about how they’re going to modernize and automate and transform a lot of these opportunities in their [customers’ IT] environments.

Dell is uniquely executing right now. I think that our supply chain is showing through. That starts with innovation. You’ve got to make great products that your channel partners can take to their customers to help them transform their businesses.

Then you have this go-to-market relationship where you’ve got the reach and the scale, both from Dell as a company but also from our ecosystem and channel partners that can go out and work with customers to actually take the innovation and make it real. And then in this market, [you have got to have] continuity, predictability of supply, the ability to deliver on these outcomes. Dell is differentiating in a big way. I think the say-do mentality of we deliver when we say we’re going to deliver [is key to our success], and we execute with these channel partners in these solution areas for our customers.

Once you deliver on the solution and kind of work through the supply chain advantages, there’s this depth of service to support the infrastructure and to be there for your customers and partners after you get through the sale. That opportunity is significant, and the channel partner feedback has really been tied to the breadth of the portfolio. We’re not just PC company. We’re not just a storage company or these two or three things. As customers redefine their business priorities and their objectives and how AI is going to reshape them, they want fewer strategic partners that can play a more meaningful role.

I think Dell’s portfolio breadth, the go-to market reach, the ecosystem with the channel partners, the supply chain predictability, reliability and the outcomes we drive, and then that services breadth, kind of stands on its own. It’s been really fun to do that with our channel partners over the last number of years, but especially in the market that we’re navigating currently.

What impact do you expect from the new base rebate on focused products and the new account rebate programs, which go into effect in August?

We always want to evaluate the channel programs to make sure that they are the most competitive. I think a lot of the things that we’ve done with the recent changes make them even more competitive.

The feedback we’ve gotten from channel partners has been super positive. We’re also focused on reducing the friction in the channel, like how do we work through [deal] registrations and systems and processes and tools, and the rest of the pull-through.

A great program is the start. Then it’s about how do you map in the field, how do you engage, how do you interact at the account level, and then how do you work with a partner through the sales process? That becomes the more durable part of building these longer-term relationships.

[Dell Chief Partner Officer] Denise [Millard] and [Dell Senior Vice President of Global Partner Revenue Operations] Darren [Sullivan] and team have done a great job making sure that those programs stay super competitive.

Dell is winning in the market now. We have been for many, many years. I think we’re accelerating the way we’re winning in the market now. I think channel partners want to be a part of that. We want channel partners to be a part of that. I think the programmatic enhancements just make that more profitable for them and make our alignment even tighter as we move forward.

What advice do you have for partners as they look out to the future with the new Agentic AI partner program?

It’s been an awesome journey. We were an early mover on a lot of this. We looked at this opportunity to modernize the company and to set ourselves up for the next 40 years. We knew that we were going to have to rethink the ways that we engage.

We started with these consistent, four durable advantages of the company: you have got to innovate great products, you have got to have the strong go-to-market, you have got to have the strong supply chain, you have got to deliver this great services. Those are the areas that we pointed AI to first.

This was all about helping our sellers spend more time doing the things they love, which is meeting with customers. It was all about automating and simplifying all the time that took you away from hours you could spend with a customer.

So we looked at how do we unlock the data our sellers need, whether it’s customer insights, asset insights, how we optimize, configure, price, quote, any of the steps that were required in a sales process. If we could apply AI behind our firewall in secured ways where we could control how we drove those outcomes we knew that we were going to drive better seller productivity.

We’re a year-plus into the journey. We’re beginning to realize, I think, a lot of the productivity lift. I think that the next kind of fun chapter here is what parts of this can we open to the partner community, such as how can we help streamline their engagement and how do we work through some of the data-driven insights [for partners] that unlocking all of this information really allows us to do.

At the end of the day, the plot was simple. We all wanted to spend more time in front of customers. That’s more time for our channel partners in front of customers. That’s more time for our sellers in front of customers, So what we are doing is leveraging AI in all the parts of the company to unlock that data, to unlock that less productive time, to free up more of that cycle time in front of a customer. We think it’s a force multiplier.

How much more time is the sales team now spending in front of customers or knocking on new account doors, and how is it paying off?

Look at the external market-share results in North America. We’ve continued to move the needle forward across each of these lines of business. From a cultural standpoint, I’m very focused on making sure that we stay humble and hungry.

The success has been great. We’re pleased but not satisfied. We want to continue to work on what we know drives better outcomes for our customers, for our sellers, for our channel partners.

The ultimate measuring stick is, are we moving our sales and market share forward? Overwhelmingly, it’s been very positive.

I still think we’re in the early innings of lots of these opportunities. I think there’s a long runway here for AI. You take the prefix of the word ‘artificial’ out of artificial intelligence, and you just ask yourself, what’s the demand for intelligence? It’s pretty high. I think the opportunity to continue to do this with our customers and partners will persist long into the future.

How big a factor is continuity of demand in your sales conversations with customers in North America?

These AI factories aren’t just built for the Fortune 50. We’re really looking at this as a huge opportunity that goes a lot broader than just the top of the pyramid.

[Dell Vice Chairman and COO] Jeff [Clarke] (pictured) talked about how we’ve got over 5,000 customers now that are leveraging this AI factory. That has scaled pretty consistently over the last number of quarters. Each quarter we see that number continue to grow.

Last year there were a lot of conversations around generative AI. As you get into this year, it’s more about agentic AI. As we continue to work through the evolution of AI, the capability of what’s possible just continues to expand. Our customers are rapidly trying to kind of organize around what are those use cases are and what are those outcomes.

I talk about this with our channel partners all the time: The services and consultancy opportunities for them to help customers formulate that [AI journey] is probably one of the best ROI their customers will see in a generation. The value creation opportunity for our partners is huge. The value creation for our customers is huge.

When you bring together the evolution of AI, the growth of customers in the AI factory and this value creation opportunity we see across customer environments and the way partners show up, it makes for more durable long-term relevancy for both Dell and our channel base. That’s been super fun to watch.

We’re not just talking about partners plugging stuff into the wall and doing simple installation. They are moving upstream in the conversations they’re having with customers and at the executive board level.

Partners are moving to the more interesting side of this equation with AI. It’s about how do customers make money, save money or avoid risk. These [partner] use cases help customers navigate all parts of the spectrum that customers are looking to work through.

How do you see the channel evolving in the agentic AI era?

I think our biggest opportunity here is continuing to activate that enterprise customer base. It’s that 5,000 customers [already adopting Dell AI Factory with Nvidia solutions] and growing metric.

That represents a huge opportunity. The channel has always helped immensely with reach and scale. When you look at the saturation of opportunity relative to how much is out there, we’re in the top of the second inning or the bottom of the first inning.

There’s so much to do. The other interesting thing [about AI] is this is the worst the models will ever be. It just gets better every week and every month.

I loved a lot of the [infrastructure] announcements that we made on day two [of Dell Technologies World]. You can see the ecosystem and partnership announcements going even deeper. We talked about some of these frontier models like Gemini coming on-premises. It takes what was already a good base of conversation [with customers] and it just expands and expands and expands.

Momentum is a real thing. You know when you have momentum. It feels like we’ve got some really, really good momentum.

Back to my ‘humble and hungry’ comment. We just have to stay very, very grounded in what we’re here to do. We’re here to help customers drive their outcomes. We do that through our partner community and our channel. If we can stay true to that, I think this will be an amazing wave that will scale a long time and continue to give Dell an opportunity to differentiate who we are and the role we play in the industry with customers and partners.

What makes Dell unique in terms of the Dell sales culture?

We have one of the largest go-to-market organizations in technology. That starts with scale. We also have the largest portfolio in the spaces we compete in. So you have this immense opportunity to take the width and breadth of the portfolio, the size and scale of the go-to market engine, and the customer focus, which is never lost.

This is what we get up and do every day: trying to help move customer outcomes forward. I think when you combine the power of the portfolio with the power of the channel and the customer-focused outcomes, what you start to see is this flywheel effect.

So we may start helping a customer on their multi-cloud journey and after we deliver those outcomes it moves to AI use cases and [Dell] AI Factory and then it goes to modern workforce transformation, leveraging Dell for displays and peripherals along with commercial PCs, and then it’s cyber resiliency. All of these things start to sing.

The value that you provide the customer is fewer strategic partners that can be more meaningful and more credible. We show up at our best when we’re able to articulate sort of the end- to-end advantages of that leading portfolio with the leading ecosystem we have in the channel and staying focused on those customer outcomes.

Those ultimately become really unique differentiators, and they’re durable differentiators. It’s hard to copy that. I think when you pair that up with the predictability in the supply chain and the scale of the global services reach we have, then Dell is one of one.

We’re really, really uniquely positioned. That has sort of been the plot. I think that will continue to be the plot. I think consistency here is actually a pretty good call out.

The strategy has not dramatically changed. We have been focused on helping customers in these core areas for a number of years. We keep layering in the innovation across the products. We keep layering in the innovation across the solution orientation and we stay very focused with the channel, helping to have them work with us as we’ve evolved these solution and outcome areas.