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Enterprise Strategy Group | Getting to the Bigger Truth™
The Dell Technologies Global Alliances Story
IT Optimization in Today’s
Multicloud World
Solving IT Complexity to Make IT
Optimization a Reality
By Kevin Rhone, Director, Channel Acceleration;
and Anne McConnell, Senior Channel Consultant
April 2020
The Evolution of IT
Information technology (IT) used to be made up of many interconnected physical systems, bridged by a set of wires. A lot of focus was placed on server names, storage brands, and the spaces in which these systems “lived.”
Enter digital transformation. Now IT is defined by cloud, hybrid cloud, and multicloud environments, and the applications and associated data they produce, manage, and store. This digital transformation is often delivered as-a-service.
“Many leaders are tempted to lead like a chess master, striving to control every move, when they should be leading like gardeners, creating and maintaining a ‘viable ecosystem in which the organization operates.’”
-Stanley A. McChrystal
Just like IT itself has evolved, so too has the ecosystem through which technology is designed, delivered, consumed, and managed. It’s changing quicker than analysts and marketers can come up with metaphors to describe the change. Unfortunately, IT departments must wrestle with their budgets while supporting these efforts, as was discovered in ESG’s 2020 Technology Spending Intentions Survey:
FROM THE SURVEY:
“Challenges abound on the path to digital transformation—obstacles that can divert precious IT funds from more innovative initiatives. For instance, today’s sophisticated malware and ransomware attacks call for investment in robust cybersecurity solutions, while a dearth of qualified tech talent means increased reliance on third-party service providers. Certainly, challenges are part of running an organization in the digital age. Moving forward, though, it’s clear organizations must balance their IT budgets so that they are equal parts investments in emerging technology (i.e., blockchain, bots, and IoT) and reinforcements of an organization’s existing IT assets.”1
For today’s enterprises to successfully engage in digital transformation in complex environments where cloud usage is ubiquitous and most remaining on-premises workloads will be cloud candidates over the next five years, they must start to build on a foundation of modern IT infrastructure that includes a stack of hardware and software solutions, supported by simplified, unified cloud management. These solutions must be integrated and developed through an ecosystem involving partnerships, and no one company can be an expert in all the technologies required to deliver the infrastructure, systems, applications, security, and interplay that creates superior business outcomes. It takes a healthy ecosystem of suppliers and service providers of all types to deliver on the promise of IT optimization. It requires strong leadership in technology, a partner-led approach, and commitment to support and collaboration.
Customers Need Innovation, Trust, and Scalability to Achieve IT Optimization Goals: The Three Pillars
Customers must trust their suppliers and partners, see innovation on the horizon, and to be ready to scale at a moment’s notice. Dell Technologies has produced in each of these areas, as can be seen in ESG White Paper, Dell Technologies Partners: The Three Pillars That Support IT Optimization.
Unlike previously, when enterprise IT departments preferred to “keep all their eggs in one basket,” today’s IT leaders tell us that they rely heavily on comprehensive vendor and partner ecosystems to modernize their data centers, support critical workloads that may run in private or public clouds, and achieve the level of business transformation that will keep them competitive. In today’s world, this means engaging with a range of experts, including value-added solution providers, systems integrators (SIs), cloud service providers (CSPs), and IT outsourcers.
IT leaders who bring in partners to work closely with their teams can develop a strategy and follow a roadmap that applies industry-leading innovations, manages the tech foundation, and delivers positive business outcomes. To be effective, true partnerships must be supported by a set of pillars in order to create new solutions for IT optimization in this new era where cloud efficiency and effectiveness is a key requirement.
Partnerships Fulfill Cloud Adoption Goals
Anticipating market and customer need, Dell Technologies has built what ESG considers a strategic and innovative partner program to help partners deliver value for their customers as they progress along the IT optimization maturity curve.
ESG regularly reviews and evaluates IT vendor go-to-market strategies, programs, and partnerships, and we believe that Dell Technologies Global Alliances does it best. This paper has been created to provide information and guidance for IT decision makers who are looking to justify and plan their investments in IT optimization, support cloud adoption, and outline a course of action. This guidance works for a growing number of leading enterprise customers in markets around the world.
What Is Digital Transformation? Why Does It Matter?
Digital transformation comes about as the result of leveraging new technologies to rethink business processes to become more flexible and innovative, and it allows companies to better compete and thrive in the digital age. Digital transformation impacts every part of a company’s lifecycle: from hiring employees to supporting long-term customer value. It’s happening, it’s important, and it starts with the evolution and optimization of the entire IT and infrastructure environment—but it’s not easy.
A scarcity of experienced and qualified talent means that organizations often struggle to drive digital transformation initiatives internally and must look outside of their company to make the changes they need. Every company will need to get there, but most will do so at their own pace.
In the last decade, the future according to Michael Dell revolved around digital transformation, which resulted in him taking Dell private and making the largest IT acquisition in history with the $67 billion purchase of EMC to create what he calls ‘the essential infrastructure company.’”2
IT Optimization and Cloud Adoption: A Prerequisite for Achieving Digital Transformation
Since digital transformation initiatives are fundamentally tech-led, the underlying technology infrastructure, supporting associated business applications, and IT services must evolve accordingly. Legacy IT has been unprepared to meet the requirements of the new digital business since it is characterized by application cycle times measured in months, if not years; siloed infrastructure that prohibits organizations from viewing their data holistically; and performance bottlenecks that impact end-user experience in a world that demands constant availability and response times.
Further, rigid architectures that force organizations to make forklift upgrades as requirements change and traditional provisioning processes in which IT is often seen as a barrier rather than an enabler for business have further complicated transformation efforts. IT leaders now recognize that they need to transform, and that their existing, legacy IT organizations need guidance.
End-user Executives Speak about Transformation and Optimization
“Transformation of the business cannot be truly realized unless IT sees itself as a key enabler of innovation.”
- Life Sciences, China, Stage 3 IT Maturity
“IT is deeply ingrained in every aspect of our business, and unless IT is constantly transformed and optimized, our competitiveness cannot be maintained.”
- Media, Japan, Stage 2 IT Maturity
IT Optimization Benefits: For Customers, They’re Real and Substantial
As a result of its ongoing research, The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) has developed a clear point of view regarding the positive outcomes of IT transformation, and the implications are clear: IT transformation and optimization progress provide serious operational and strategic benefits to organizations, and advanced technology investment is clearly a leading factor for innovation and digital transformation. Simply put, transformed organizations that have optimized their IT services environments respond to a dynamic business landscape more quickly, operate their environments at a lower cost, and allocate greater resources to new and innovative initiatives compared with their less mature counterparts.
Cloud Ubiquity Shapes Hybrid IT Services Delivery
One of the biggest transformations in IT service delivery over the past decade has been the emergence of public cloud infrastructure consumption. In terms of adoption, overall cloud usage has reached a point of near ubiquity, with an overwhelming 94% of organizations currently leveraging public cloud services to some extent (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Public Cloud Services Use
Does your organization currently use public cloud services (SaaS, IaaS)? (Percent of respondents, N=658)
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group
ESG has also been tracking organizational adoption of cloud infrastructure in its annual technology spending intentions survey, observing that the number of organizations currently relying on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) has skyrocketed from 27% in 2012 to 67% in 2020 (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. IaaS Use, 2012-2020
Percentage of organizations currently using infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), 2012-2020.
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group
Companies Increasingly Consider On-premises and Public Cloud Equally for New Workload Deployment
To better gauge the role of public cloud services in overall IT strategy, respondents were asked to consider the approach their organization typically takes when it comes to new application deployments. Nearly four in ten (38%) take a cloud-first approach, meaning that new applications are rolled out on public cloud resources unless someone makes a compelling case to deploy them on-premises, while 53% of organizations consider both on-premises and public cloud services equally (see Figure 3). However, the most significant year-over-year trend is the continued drop off for those organizations taking an on-premises-first approach, falling from 24% in 2018 to just 9% this year.
Figure 3. New Application Deployment Approaches, 2018-2020
Which of the following best describes the approach your organization takes when it comes to new application deployments? (Percent of respondents, N=580)
Cloud Complexity and the Impact of Cloud Management Consistency
ESG research has found that on average, nearly three-quarters of remaining on-premises workloads could move to the public cloud over the next five years (see Figure 4).
Figure 4. Workload Candidates to Move to Public Cloud
Think about all of the applications and workloads that your organization currently runs in your on-premises data centers. What percentage of these workloads are/aren’t candidates to move to public cloud services over the next five years? (Mean, N=658)
Defining What It Means to Have Cloud Management Consistency
As part of a Research Insights Paper, ESG sought to assess cloud management consistency among survey respondents by asking:3
1. How many infrastructure management tools are in use to administer public cloud resources?
2. Is the organization able to use any of the same infrastructure management tools on-premises as it does for public cloud resources?
3. Are the infrastructure management tools used across on- and off-premises locations extensively relied upon?
Only organizations that have consolidated their cloud management tools (three discrete tools or fewer), which are usable regardless of infrastructure locality (on-premises or off-premises), and that are using those same tools to manage the majority of their on-premises environment were considered to have a high degree of cloud management consistency. Just 5% of the respondents surveyed reported their organization met all these criteria today (see Figure 5).
Figure 5. Characteristics and Scarcity of Consistent Cloud Managers
Consolidated cloud management tools
Used across both public and private clouds
Used extensively on-premises
The Organization must be using a manageable number of tool to administer public cloud-resident infrastructure.
Tools in use to manage public cloud infrastructure must also be usable for infrastructure in an on-premises private cloud environment.
Organization must be actively using these tools to manage a material proportion of their on-premises infrastructure.
Only 5% of all qualified respondents met all three criteria.
The results of this research show that organizations are struggling with overly complex multicloud environments, and fragmentation is only expected to increase over time.
Key Findings from Our Study
What were the major learnings from the research?4 Unsurprisingly, organizations see tremendous value in the concept of management simplification. When respondents were asked about the prospect of using consistent infrastructure management tools across private and public cloud locations, they told us they would expect to:
Organizations see tremendous value in the concept of management simplification; among the few organizations that have made material progress implementing cloud management consistency, realized benefits often outstripped the expectations.
• Reduce costs by 19% on average.
• Reduce the number of security breaches, application outages, or other events affecting their public cloud-resident data by 30% on average.
• Shorten the calendar time needed to migrate a cloud workload from one cloud to another, or back on-premises, by 35% on average.
• Free up an average of 70.5 person-hours per week (or nearly 2 full-time equivalents) in infrastructure management time.
• Improve developer experience and performance: 96% believe it will be easier for developers to push code to production, with 56% saying they would expect at least daily code pushes.
• Reduce the frequency of problematic cloud projects, shrinking the frequency of budget overages and timeline overruns by 28% and 38% respectively.
• Increase their pace of innovation (74% reported), ultimately resulting in five incremental products/services launched annually.
Consistent Cloud Management Drives Hybrid Cloud IT Optimization and Helps Make IT a Hero
It’s clear that whether discussing expectations or reality, respondents see multifaceted value from increasing the consistency of hybrid cloud management. These various technical and business benefits of IT optimization roll up to impact bigger picture considerations. For example, all respondent organizations are operating a hybrid environment, but how effective have their hybrid cloud initiatives been to date at driving value for the organization?
The answer is generally positive, though there is a clear divide based on management consistency: 38% of organizations with cloud management consistency report these initiatives have been very effective at driving value for the organizations compared with 27% of organizations without cloud management consistency.
38% of consistent cloud managers report hybrid cloud initiatives have been very effective at driving value for the organizations compared with 27% of organizations without cloud management consistency.
IT’s role in enacting cloud management consistency was also an area of interest in the research. We assessed whether IT’s standing in the organization was related to their ability to enact cloud management consistency. The answer to that question was an emphatic “Yes!” ESG asked all respondents to characterize how the IT organization is viewed by others in the organization, specifically in this case by developer constituents. IT is viewed positively at nine out of ten (89%) organizations with cloud management consistency today, meaning IT is viewed as either a competitive differentiator or a high-value service provider. By contrast, the plurality of organizations lacking cloud management consistency rate IT as just adequate. Said another way, IT organizations with consistent cloud management operations are 3.4x more likely to be viewed as a competitive differentiator (see Figure 6).5
Figure 6. Differences in IT’s Standing, by Cloud Management Consistency
Perception of IT, by Cloud Management Consistency.(Percent of respondents)
Where Do IT Leaders Start on the Road to IT Optimization? They Ask for Help from the Experts
For many organizations, enacting cloud management consistency now may feel like trying to squeeze toothpaste back into the tube: Achieving IT optimization by rationalizing cloud services in use as well as the native controls to manage them may seem daunting. Many IT leaders feel this way. ESG’s research shows that more than nine out of ten organizations (91%) work with third parties, be they IT vendors, system integrators, value-added resellers, or all three, to help architect and implement cloud infrastructure projects. Why? Key among the many reasons are the abilities to save time and money (see Figure 7).6
Figure 7. The Benefits of Partnering with Third Parties on Cloud Projects
For which of the following reasons has your organization engaged third parties for professional services to architect and implement cloud infrastructure projects? (Percent of respondents, N=1,139, multiple responses accepted)
While cloud transformation projects, including efforts to reshape cloud management experience, will drive dramatic business and technical benefits, organizations would be well served to explore partnerships with cloud solution architects who can help remove the friction from these transformations rather than going it alone. This includes seeking out partners that can implement solutions in both private and public cloud environments, and which deliver openness and choice across public cloud providers to organizations rather than proprietary solutions optimized for a single public cloud.
The Partner Ecosystem Adjusts to the New Hybrid, Multicloud Reality
In addition to simply “keeping the lights on” in the form of tactical tasks like updating system hardware and storing and protecting data, IT organizations are increasingly looking to leverage more strategic—and nascent—endeavors like hybrid and multicloud workload integration, and effective management of scarce IT resources. Rapid-fire requests for new and custom solutions have compressed the timeline for delivering technologies, which in turn has led to the emergence of shadow IT and the era of six-figure annual bills for consumption-based infrastructure-as-a-service, signed up for by frustrated LOB users. Organizations must be increasingly agile and compliant to run in today’s multicloud world.
With this, IT departments are also facing difficulty hiring and retaining the right talent. For example, ESG research has found that more than four in ten (44%) senior IT decision makers cite cybersecurity as an area in which they continue to have a shortfall of skills in 2020, with other commonly cited skills shortages areas including IT orchestration and automation (34%) and cloud architecture/planning (33%). This exacerbates the fact that, even though there are more technology options for IT organizations than ever before, IT professionals believe that the technology they’re tasked with deploying and supporting is—in many cases—making their jobs more difficult.
As a result, forward-looking organizations are rapidly evolving their on-premises IT environments to keep pace, investing in solutions that enable a public cloud-like operating model, in terms of both agility and economics, on-premises.
With a constant flow of new applications and the increasingly compounded interplay between systems and these applications, having the right ecosystem is more critical than ever. Organizations are investing in solutions that allow them to modernize and optimize their on-premises service delivery so that it can match the scalability, elasticity, and self-service nature (via employee-accessible service catalogues) of public cloud environments.
Enterprise IT decision makers have increasingly looked toward leading integration and service provider partners for more: to identify, recommend, implement, and support the complex IT infrastructure and systems, and to own the end-to-end optimization of IT delivery and digital transformation. They are now asking these partners to review the applications that are necessary, the networking and middleware software that is needed to complement the platforms and infrastructure they will run on, and where these applications reside, all in an effort to make sure these elements are as unified and as effective as possible.
Partnerships: Accelerators for IT Optimization
ESG believes that Dell Technologies has developed and nurtured the right ecosystem, and in doing so, has created multiple pathways to address many IT complications.
This is led by the Dell Technologies Global Alliances program and partners, and a fundamental go-to-market strategy that is based on partners sitting at the forefront, helping customers to simplify and streamline their complex multicloud environments in order to embrace digital transformation. Dell Technologies provides value through not only technology but also its brand, distribution, global presence, sales support, and Global Alliances Partner Program investment.
The partners in the Dell Technologies Global Alliances program are categorized into three areas and serve as transformation agents—SIs, SOs, and CSPs. They operate and serve joint customers across the globe (see Figure 8).
Primer: Global Alliances Partner Types
Cloud service provider (CSP): Partners who leverage Dell Technologies to provide pay-as-you-go, self-service, and off-premises cloud services.
Strategic Outsourcer (SO): Partners who manage and host services (workloads, applications, data centers, and migration) on- and off-premises.
System Integrator (SI): Partners who provide services including business consulting and technology integration.
All are supported by Dell Technologies subject matter experts who drive business development in key vertical markets with core sales and partner teams.
Figure 8. Dell Technologies Global Alliances Partners
These partners specialize in all areas of IT optimization: application development, application support, and/or scaling in multicloud environments. They hone the skills and experience needed for taking ownership of the complete, end-to-end operational foundation. Working closely with their customers, ESG found that the best partners are structured to deliver on this ownership promise and deliver quantifiable proof of the promise of IT optimization.
Global Alliances Partners can point to these hard-data examples of their impact (see Table 1).
Table 1. Measurable Customer Benefits Delivered by Dell Technologies Global Alliances Partners
| Engagement/Project Type | Measurable Customer Benefit |
|---|---|
| Data center modernization | 30% cost reduction Simplified management |
| Backup-as-a-service implementation | 90% reduction in network traffic Shorter backup/replication windows |
| Partner-branded analytics solutions | 10x increase in storage capacity Overall 20% cost savings |
The common thread in these examples (improved speed, agility, and results) is echoed in a quote from Melissa Yonge-Smith, Global Partner Executive, DXC/Dell Technologies Global Alliance:
“DXC Technology and Dell Technologies have the same commitment and passion to provide clients with innovative next-generation technology solutions and services that leverage deep industry expertise and global scale. By having a common vision and a comprehensive strategic plan, we are improving speed and agility and accelerating our customer’s business-driven results.”
Partnerships: Leading Solution Co-creation
The Dell Technologies Service Provider Technology Transformation Team (SPT2) is a global organization chartered with “accelerating go-to-market with Dell Technologies Service Provider Partners through solution co-creation.” They are fully “soup to nuts” in terms of working in lock step with Global Alliances Partners to conceive and create new solutions, in addition to sales enablement, demand creation, and joint selling programs.
The Impact of the Global Alliances Program
Four years ago, Dell and EMC joined forces, in the largest technology merger in history, to become Dell Technologies. Dell Technologies (Dell) now unites six closely aligned technology brands (Dell, Dell EMC, VMware, RSA, Secureworks, and Virtustream) around a common vision and strategy. Rather than operating in silos, Dell Technologies has been successful because of a commitment to partners of all types who work together as an integral part of delivering complex customer solutions. In order to best serve its customers, last year Dell ended multiple partner programs and replaced them with one: The Dell Technologies Partner Program.
Dell Technologies also recognized the increasingly critical role its Global Alliances Partners were taking in enterprise accounts. These partners were delivering better solutions and business outcomes and required the creation and implementation of a Global Partner Program to attract and retain the right types of partners and build out a healthy and competitive ecosystem.
Dell Technologies, as a leader in hardware, software and solutions, acts as the enabler for Digital Transformation. To become real, IT Transformation requires an ecosystem, driven by our Global Alliances partners, to integrate the platforms and architectures that enable today’s multiple consumption models.”
- Jay Snyder (SVP Global Alliances)
For the customer, this means that partners can sell across the six brands of the Dell Technologies ecosystem in multiple consumption models. That makes it easier for partners to design, build, and then sell complex solutions, and ultimately customers are the ones who benefit.
ESG believes one of the most important factors is the opportunity for partners of any size to work directly with Dell Technologies to create, build, and deliver unique customer solutions. This has been enabled and executed by a unique engineering and development team, called the Dell Technologies Service Provider Technology Transformation Team.
The Impact of the Global Alliances Program
The Dell Technologies Service Provider Technology Transformation Team (SPT2) is a global organization chartered with “accelerating go-to-market with Dell Technologies Service Provider Partners through solution co-creation.” They are fully “soup to nuts” in terms of working in lock step with Global Alliances Partners to conceive and create new solutions, in addition to sales enablement, demand creation, and joint selling programs.
Common engagements include ideation workshops, service creation workshops, horizontal solution creation, and codeveloped solutions. The SPT2 team is constantly evolving to help drive the success of partners with advanced solutions such as Risk and Compliance Management that addresses GDPR compliance; AI for SPs; Mainframe Modernization, which enables an SP to build a new revenue stream around converting mainframe apps to X86; Backup as a Service for SPs; and Private LTE.
Dell’s channel strategy has come a long way since the company began its channel march in 2007. In Dell Technologies’ first fiscal quarter, 2020, the company reported $21.9 billion in revenue, up 3 percent year over year. Partner sales in its first fiscal quarter spiked 16 percent year over year, accounting for more than 50 percent of the company’s overall revenue. Dell said these staggering numbers would never have been achieved if the company did not shift its strategy from solely direct sales to a channel-led model.”
CRN, The Future According To Michael Dell
Partnerships: Where Customers Win
Dell Technologies Global Alliances Partners are already working with many of the enterprise customers with whom Dell Technologies engages. These joint customers see Dell Technologies as an innovative leader in infrastructure and technology, and they look for partners who can help review needs and take ownership, bridging between the complex world of applications and the platforms and infrastructure needed to make them work.
Partners bring the sum of their experiences across different customers, business models, and maturity levels to the table. In this way, Dell Technologies and their Global Alliances Partners are in lock step, delivering benefits to end-users:
Our team works with partners around the world to enable solution creation from ideation through go-to-market and joint campaigns to both drive adoption and promote joint sales.”
- Doug Lieberman, Dell Technologies
• Partners fill customer resource gaps as they add applications in order to deliver services and optimize the interplay between infrastructure and applications.
• Partners provide vertical market knowhow about compliance—like what data should be extracted, shared, stored, managed, and used to drive business.
• Partners keep pace with rapid change, integrating the entire Dell Technologies portfolio with the latest advances across multicloud infrastructure, security, and the mobility landscape, and in doing so pass along valuable IP and experience.
• Partners help their customers holistically and efficiently manage all their infrastructure regardless of whether they are running workloads in the public cloud, in a private cloud, at the edge, or on-premises.
• Partners provide the ability to engage in a variety of cloud-led, consumption-based business models and terms, with the flexibility to pay only for what is needed.
• Finally, partners provide ongoing support for the entire customer multicloud journey, ensuring IT transformation success.
The Real World: Global Alliances Partners Deliver Cloud-led Customer Outcomes (A Case Study)
Dell Technologies Partners engage with their customers to take full advantage of innovative Dell technology. With this foundation of trust, they then add their own professional services (both pre- and post-sales) to design, develop, and deploy a complete value package that increasingly leverages their unique intellectual property and recurring services offering. This is how enterprise customers prefer to engage in today’s changing IT world.
An example of how one Global Alliances Partner worked closely with the local Dell Technologies team to deliver on this promise is shown here:
The Customer: GenApi Division of Septeo was founded in 1988 as the first software publisher in France for notaries, and featuring a combination of juridical content, software reliability, and diversity of services (technical, training, and support). Based in Paris, France, it grew to become the supplier for 3,200 notary offices and 40,000 users, and operated a dedicated, secure network.
The Challenge: With its customer base spread across France, GenApi needed to reliably back up the data, input, and transactions generated by more than 2,500 notaries each day to a centralized data center operated by IBM in Paris. The current solution required dedicated equipment, and support for unique configurations and rules to manage all the different networks and firewalls in place. In addition to being costly to operate and support, backups were time- and resource-consuming. GenApi was also facing competitive pressures from new firms entering the space.
I rely on my partners for everything from product/solution recommendations, implementation, easy reviews to repairs and warranty work with our imaging systems. Without them, we wouldn’t be as competitive as other hospital chains. My partners are my IT consultants.”
- Senior Systems Engineer, Large Healthcare Organization
The Global Alliances Partner: RG System, based in Montpellier, France, was founded 10 years ago and has focused on solutions that feature the role of cloud computing to simplify the management of IT infrastructures. The company developed a unified management portal to handle IT monitoring, data backup, and endpoint security. It serves managed services providers (MSPs), independent software vendors (ISVs), and end-customers in its role as a system integrator (SI).
The Solution: RG System collaborated with the Dell Technologies team in Paris to develop and deploy RG System proprietary software agents to each notary office and user. They provided branded software and IT services to replace the cumbersome, rules-based system in place, providing reliable, fast backups to be made daily to new Dell EMC Avamar-powered backup solutions (software and storage) housed at the centralized IBM data center.
The Outcomes: By replacing the legacy systems in place, RG System and Dell Technologies together delivered value in two important areas:
-
For the users: Notaries saw faster, easier backup to the cloud with times falling from hours to seconds, and now enjoy the benefits of time savings, higher reliability, and security from a cloud-based solution.
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For the customer: GenApi benefited from reduced time, energy, and cost to support clients, and much lower storage costs. Plus, by adding a cutting-edge solution, the company became a more efficient and reliable provider for its customers.
The Bigger Truth
The Channel Delivers: Where the Complexities of IT Optimization and Digital Transformation Meet
Digital transformation is more than a buzzword. It is an imperative for companies that are striving to be competitive both today and in the future. Leveraging new technologies and rethinking businesses processes in today’s mobile, fast paced, cloud-led world affects every part of a company’s lifecycle: from hiring employees to supporting long-term customer value. The evolution of the entire IT and infrastructure environment toward multicloud is critical to achieving digital transformation, but enterprise customers have found it’s not easy to go through the transformation process alone.
For almost all organizations, cloud adoption has outpaced the implementation of common management tools to span those clouds (both off-premises and on-premises). ESG research shows reducing the management complexity of multicloud by introducing consistent infrastructure and operations is expected to drive significant results such as meaningful cost savings, hardened security, reclaimed productive time, accelerated innovation and app development, and overall business agility.
More than just expectations, organizations on the leading edge of the unified cloud management and orchestration spectrum have already achieved significant early gains in terms of achieving levels of IT optimization. In many cases, benefits from security, through agility, to cost savings have been larger in practice and exceeded expectations.
Dell Technologies Global Alliances: Delivering on the Promise of Hybrid and Multicloud IT Optimization
Dell Technologies has proven its commitment to its enterprise customers once again through the evolution of its business model. To better serve its customers, it believes that partnering is key, and that it takes a mutual commitment of time, value, and investment, built on top of a set of pillars. The goal of Dell Technologies’ partner programs is to support its customers’ IT optimization goals by enabling strong partners that fuel innovation, supported by the power of trust and committed to scaling for the future.
Dell Technologies recognizes that partnering with top services and advisory talent makes for a compelling joint offer, and a portfolio that solves real business problems. They dedicate teams to Global Alliances Partners and have more than 600 cross-functional team members in place to support customers and partners globally. Architects and industry experts, working with Global Alliances Partners, quickly bring solutions geographically closer to the customer.
This forward thinking has paid off, with 28% YOY growth in Global Alliances business, reaching $US11B in revenue in just over four years across the globe. Clearly, enterprises find that Dell Technologies’ approach to the market is different, resonates, and delivers value.
ESG sees Dell Technologies Global Alliances Partner program as a competitive differentiator that enables partners to make full use of Dell Technologies’ leading infrastructure portfolio, fully meet customers’ solution-based needs, and help them realize the benefits of IT optimization. Complementary program elements help the best partners and their customers work together to reduce risk and support faster go-to-market actions.
As a direct result of the power of the ecosystem, everyone wins in the race to IT optimization and digital transformation.
1 Source: ESG Research Report, 2020 Technology Spending Intentions Survey, Feb 2020. All ESG research references and charts in this white paper have been taken from this research report unless otherwise noted.
2 Source: CRN, The Future According to Michael Dell, Jul 2019.
3 Source: ESG Research Insights Paper, The Cloud Complexity Imperative, Feb 2020.
4 ibid.
5 ibid.
6 ibid.
This ESG White Paper was commissioned by Dell Technologies and is distributed under license from ESG.
All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at 508.482.0188.