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A day after Dell reported disappointing revenue and earnings figures, resulting in its stock trading down nearly 10 percent Friday, two of the vendor's senior channel executives spoke with CRN Assistant News Editor Scott Campbell about the results and Dell's solution provider program, nearing its two-year anniversary.
Greg Davis, vice president and general manager, global commercial channels, and Paul Shaffer, director of U.S. marketing and operations for Dell's global commercial channels, said the company is exceeding goals with enterprise-focused solution providers and expects SMB revenue through the channel to pick up after lowering the deal registration threshold last month to $15,000. The following are excerpts from the conversation:
Dell's sales fell 15 percent and earnings 54 percent in the third fiscal quarter. Within those results, how did your channel business perform?
Davis: We can't quote specific numbers, but we're very proud of the fact that the effort we put in place almost 2 years ago has continued to pay off for us.
In Q3, indirect global business was 26 percent of commercial revenue. When you look at the same business a year ago, it was 20 percent of total commercial business. We continue to meet our objectives, grow faster than the market, grow 2 times our direct business. A lot of that is having stayed focused on solution partners, especially those in the enterprise arena, focused on server, storage, and solutions like virtualization, consolidation and green IT.
We hit all of our goals. The team executed very well. As [CEO] Michael [Dell] said, the first three weeks of November have seen strength, improvement overall. We've seen the same strength and improvement in the channel business. We feel really good about the efforts we put in place.
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