Security emerged as Dell’s current major focus area as the vendor opened its annual channel event- dubbed Peak Performance - in Berlin. The company said it expects to more than double security solution sales in 2015, as well as highlighting continued channel growth as one of its strategic goals for the year.
Stressing the importance of strong partnerships, Dell EMEA President Aongus Hegarty told the 300-delegate audience: “Over the last few years, our focus has been working with key partners to expand our portfolio and we’re setting even higher target for our partner network this year.”
Dell’s quest for stronger footing in the channel came more apparent earlier this month as the firm struck a new distribution agreement with Tech Data in the UK&I. At the event the vendor said it expects distribution revenue to grow by more than 50% during the current year.
Overall channel growth was outlined as one of Dell‘s ‘crucial goals for 2015’ with a target 30% year-on-year increase in this area, the same as the firm achieved last year. According to Ronnie Wilson, VP Dell Software EMEA, over 60% of the vendor’s software is already shifted through the channel.
The vendor claims its software division has grown from about $100m to $2bn in the last three years, and Wilson was keen to emphasise its importance for the overall business. “Software is very key to Dell- it’s a game-changer,” he said. “Building end-to-end capability is the future. Building capability in the cloud, in mobility, big data and in security. And software is critical to that, it’s the glue that makes everything work and holds it all together.”
Dell sees security as central focus point for its own strategy but also in the wider space. “From talking to partners and customers all across the [EMEA] region, I know security is on top of everyone’s agenda,” Hegarty said.
Curtis Hutcheson, VP Dell Security echoed the thought, saying companies across the board have started to realise security breaches are not going away. This, according to Dell, is leading to more and more encrypted data traffic. “People are actively realising that security breaches will happen, and they are now aggressively encrypting more data to prevent a breach from happening,” Hutcheson said. But as encryption makes it extremely difficult to inspect network traffic, this is creating another huge security concern. This, as Dell’s Executive Director of Network Security Patrick Sweeney put it, affects everyone’s business and could be detrimental to solution providers’ service capabilities unless tackled with the right technical abilities.
It is clear that security is central to Dell’s strategy. It could play a key role in the vendor’s pursuit of the SMB segment, which it has traditionally served on the hardware side but remains fairly untapped in terms of software.