This Partner first strategy, with letting go of experienced sales and technical resources will only work if the partners hire the ex-Dell staff. There are many technical aspects to ordering enterprise level storage and servers. If mistakes are made, data centers can suffer. I understand Dell wanting to shed payroll, but they still need the resources and I think they hope the partners gobble them up, same will go with the PS staff
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If Dell were serious about leading with partners, they wouldn't have cut so many technical channel resources.
Look carefully into what the partner requirements are.... lots of training and certifications. A partner can get their respective discounts higher by getting the tech staff further trained up as well, and earn even more MDF. Put quite simply its a great strategy for a PARTNER that can be self sufficient (thats the key right there... most resellers are continually looking for OEM leads and deals, heck, its just human nature) - however there are a few like WWT that have invested a small fortune in interoperability labs and really can execute.
That said, figure out the burdened labor rate of a Sr Architect/engineer with the OEM (its north of $300k annual) and you'll quickly see its far cheaper to offer the channel larger discounts to shed the HR overhead. While I dont argue that this leaves the OEM with a much smaller field staff for working deals, that's not the direction... simply put the resellers become the replacement, the OEM sales teams will get shrunk to minimal staffing in the upcoming quarters.
Retired from Dell myself when our field team was not longer relevant (meaning the channel could be more self-sufficient). Id suggest that everyone get comfortable with a side hustle and not rely on a W2... those can and will go away, as we are witnessing now.
The only way Dell makes this successful is if the AEs/SAs who remain at Dell stop working with the same 2-3 partners per district. There are districts with partners who have more presales resources in market than we have but the AEs/SAs don't work with them. A perfect example is SHI in Chicago. There are 22+ AEs and 5 SEs for SHI living in Chicago but they didn't make the cut when the channel leadership was building focus partner lists. The lists focused on Ahead, CDW, and 3 small partners who have a small sales/presales team. Can you imagine how much revenue SHI does to afford that headcount in one city and we chose not to do business with them? We should be at our channel leadership with pitchforks demanding them to make decisions to set us up to be successful in this new model.
I guess that also brings the point that our Channel leadership is mostly full of people who manage by spreadsheet and don't go out to meet customers/partners themselves.
I want this to be successful. So many of our competitors did it. We, however, can't seem to get out of our own way to make it work. It's us who are the problem. We can't expand our partner base locally and our national leadership doesn't seem to understand how to explain why we should.
wut