Dell fleshes out its ‘Harmony’ mid-market partner opportunity

For channel partners, “Project Harmony” was a particular point of interest - and opportunity - revealed at Dell Technologies’ global conference last month.

Reseller News sat down with Dell’s senior vice president, global services sales, channel, alliances and OEM, Christina Crowley, to find out what the company’s new “white label” program meant, how partners could engage and what happens next.

The delivery of channel services today usually fitted into one of three models, Crowley explained.

Partners could deliver Dell’s services, from traditional “support and deploy” through to a developing portfolio of professional services.

“Channel partners can resell our services,” Crowley said. 

“They can establish competencies to deliver our services, and they can do that on their own, specific to deployment and specific to our product lines.”

A channel partner could have one competency or they could have five depending on their capabilites and how they wanted to go to market.

The third mode is co-delivery.

“They are reselling our deployment service but they are doing the delivery,” Crowley explained. “The benefit to the channel partner is they get reimbursed for the deployment services they are delivering and receive a back-end rebate.”

No one-size-fits-all

With around 240,000 partners globally, all with different capabilties, Dell is on a mission to understand what these are, what Dell can offer and how the vendor and its partners could complement each other while still thinking about the end user and the outcome they are trying to achieve.

“There’s no one size fits all with a channel partner,” Crowley said. “It’s really about developing the relationship and understanding their capabilities.”

Today, there are Dell services and there are partners services, each with different skews and different statements of work.

Crowley said Dell had been asked by partners for a way to embed, to “in essence white label”, the vendor’s services into their own offerings to own the relationship with mid market end users.

For engaged partners, it was an opportunity for partners to develop and deliver additional capabilities for them to support and to earn additional rebate incentives for resale, Crowley said.

In development now, it is expected Harmony will be piloted in the US in Dell’s first and second quarters, ending 31 July, in EMEA in Q2 and in APJ probably in Q4, ending 31 January 2024.

Harmony would cover a portfolio of mid-market services from core support and deployment through to professional services including advisory and consulting.

“Collaborative model”

Dubbed the “collaborative model” internally, Harmony was “what to look out for” for partners, Crowley said. Feedback was not only welcome but needed.

"We believe this is what our partners were asking for over the last year and we want to make sure it's hitting the right points for them,” she said.

The portfolio broadly covers residency services - in house or remote capabilties, cyber security managed detection and response, education services for training and enablement on Dell and third party products, sustainable asset recovery services covering other vendors as well as Dell’s own products as well as a renewals practice for maintenance.

Dell also already offered a “you sell you earn” incentive for partners to gain training credits for own team as a reward for selling the vendor’s education services.

Among other channel developments, changes to financial modelling for co-delivery of services on deployment were expected to be rolled out to international markets this quarter after their US pilot.

Rob O’Neill attended Dell Technologies World 2023 in Las Vegas as a guest of Dell.