They also see storage demand resisting the recession
Storage Soup reports that Compellent believes their great results are partly due to the disturbance in the partner status quo caused by Dell’s acquisition of Equallogic.
Equallogic has great products, and they gain lots of leverage as part of Dell. But in this innovation-rich market, there’s a downside to change in the channel. Hungry companies with good products get a shot at previously loyal customers.
Any Compellent customers out there that care to comment? How about Equallogic loyalists?
3 responses so far ↓
marc farley // May 8, 2008 at 8:30 am
Hi Pete,
Our channel partners are making a lot of money and our channel business continues to grow. A lot of them were nervous about EqualLogic becoming part of Dell, but are figuring out that its a good partnership with a lot of upside.
Paul Clifford // May 11, 2008 at 11:52 am
DELL’s acquisition of Equallogic was brilliant. The relationship with EMC has never been one that either were proud of, and we all know how EMC treats their partners. So going after a company with a very good product that they can completely control makes exceptional sense.
DELL lost all the sales team from Equallogic the minute they were introduced to the DELL Comp Plan. So DELL is bringing their own troops up to speed and this transition will take the rest of 2008. DELL has been talking a good game for their “channel” on their traditional products and we have had good experiences with them on servers, switches, etc.
It doesn’t take a Rocket Scientist to know that with the manufacturing capabilities of DELL, the margins they will have to work with will be tremendous, giving them a lot of flexibility.
The Equallogic product is great for DELL, as it is not an “Enterprise Product”. Combined with it’s tremendous manufacturing capability, DELL will be bringing the overall price down dramatically in the storage market as they get themselves geared up. My prediction is that while DELL has margin to work with so a channel has viability, they will end up cutting prices to make quarterly numbers. This will eventually undercut the channel, and DELL will be direct.
A small to mid sized solution that can be sold over the phone works for DELL. Equallogic is such a product and matches the DELL approach. But understand that the channel has a very short life here.
Paul Clifford
Davenport Group
http://www.davenportgroup.com
Customer X Factor // May 12, 2008 at 6:14 am
We would have not looked at Equallogic unless Dell had done the acquisition and thanks to Dell buying them out we did order the product via the Channel.
Storage is misstion critical and after support is key, we know how HP/Dell/EMC & Cisco support works and been using the support teams for 10+ years.
I never feel to good about trust misstion critical hardware to small companys. e.g. Dell had problems with their R900 server (16cores and 82GB), the Dell support team order 2 new boxs and did not try and fix them. Would a small company do that? Do they have the $$$ to do that? Would try send lots of parts ask and try get us to do it? Its like on laptops.. have to wait for 4 pixels to die before change the screen with some players or home kit.
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