At a Glance

  • Dell has realigned its partner program to emphasize customer outcome incentives and reward consulting services that drive sales. The hardware vendor will offer premium rebates on select products starting in August, and according to Monday's announcement, will begin recognizing the contributions of system integrators and consulting firms in multi-party deals.
  • Premium rebates apply to private cloud, storage, automation, and cybersecurity platform transactions, as well as deals involving Z-series networking equipment. Dell will more closely track and reward co-selling on its redesigned, AI-driven partner platform, which will be fully operational in the second half of this year.
  • Darren Sullivan, Dell's senior vice president of global partner revenue operations, views this platform upgrade as a major shift. "We've talked before about incremental adjustments to certain parts of the process, but this is not that. This is a from-scratch rebuilt experience," he said during a briefing last week.

Deep Dive

The channel changes Dell announced at itsannual conferencein Las Vegas are part of a broader effort to help enterprises overcome AI adoption barriers.

On Monday, the company unveiled a local developer kit called Dell Deskside Agentic AI, equipped with the Nvidia NemoClaw governance framework, as part of itsproduct update roadmapcovering the next year. New data, analytics, storage, and rack-scale integrations focused on running AI workloads on hybrid cloud and on-premises infrastructure are planned for release before the first half of 2027.

Dell Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke said ina Monday announcementthat "Dell Deskside Agentic AI provides every workgroup with a secure, local environment to run agents, keeping costs predictable and intellectual property within the enterprise. What works on the desktop can scale to the data center. This is the deployment model for the next decade."

Three months ago, the Dell ecosystem underwent a minor adjustment when the companyrestored Titanium-level bonuses for its storage and client new business units, including PC-as-a-Service, private cloud, and enterprise storage products. Denise Millard, Dell's chief partner officer, said during last week's briefing that subsequent modifications addressed previously overlooked areas.

Millard said, "The spear tip is the consulting firm or system integrator. Giving them recognition and commercial benefits to help them innovate on Dell solutions so that we can deliver the right outcomes for customers regardless of how the deal is made is very important."

Managing multi-party partner transactions can be a complex business. Dell is smoothing out the details.

Sullivan said during the briefing, "The rule of engagement is that if a Dell salesperson identifies an opportunity, that customer must work through that partner. But that doesn't preclude other partners from registering opportunities in that account. The partner of record, if they have a strong customer relationship, has the responsibility to register the opportunity first, follow up, and win the incentive."

AI deployment is also a challenge, even for a company rooted in technology.

According to Sullivan, Dell began testing AI agents with a select group of partners last year to interpret customer signals, and has provided more than 200,000 insights over the past year. The company is moving forward steadily.

He said, "In this regard, we're trying to walk before we run, ensuring we have clear and transparent reasons for passing leads to partners. Over time, I expect we'll become more sophisticated, incorporating various capabilities and many other dimensions to help identify the most capable and best-suited partners to pursue opportunities."