Service Economy

Dell EMC Channel Chief John Byrne is taking the channel growth the company booked in the first half of its fiscal year as a sign that the program he formulated, and the portfolio available to partners, are on the right track. Still, but he's not taking his foot off the accelerator.

Byrne says he's planning on introducing new incentives to boost storage sales and is keeping the pressure on partners to make services a part of more transactions. The company is in a good position, Byrne said, to put distance between itself and competitors like HPE.

Byrne is also considering strategies for training and incentivizing partners to sell the new Pivotal Container Service, a partnership between Pivotal, Google Cloud and VMware.

Speaking of VMware, Byrne says making Dell Technologies a distributor for VMware in August has taken almost any trace of friction out of the partner relationship with the two companies. Since that time, Byrne said, he hasn't had a single case where channel conflict has been reported.

What follows is an edited excerpt of CRN's conversation with Byrne.