Dell Extends Cloud Play With Dell PartnerDirect Program

Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) has been focusing on diversifying its business by acquiring companies such as Quest, Clerity and Wyse. Its cloud strategy is slowly unraveling, with the latest development being the PartnerDirect program. Dell’s U.S and Canada channel partners can now offer the Dell Cloud Services to their customers under this program. It can do this is two ways: reselling the service or refer customers to dell. In the resale model, Dell provisions an instance of the Dell Cloud Services which the partner can resell to customers and in the referral model, partners will educate their customers about the Dell Cloud Services and then refer them to Dell. ^[1]

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Dell Cloud Service Partner Certification

The cloud service instance will be used to establish public, private or hybrid clouds and partners have been involved in a pilot program since April 2012. It is now launching the program to the entire PartnerDirect community interested in selling cloud services backed by Dell data centers.

It is also extending its channel certification program comprising three specialty areas of operation in providing cloud services and solutions:

• Cloud Builder
• Cloud Provider
• Cloud Services Enabler

An enabler will identify, secure and integrate the appropriate cloud technologies and services, and will also operate the resulting cloud for their customers. Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Service is the basis for this certification specialty and is available for partners to resell to their customers. We expect Dell’s cloud strategy to help the PC maker diversify its business and revenue mix as it moves away from the lower PC margin business.

We have a $19.22 Trefis price estimate for Dell, which is significantly higher than the current market price.

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1. Dell announcement [↩]