Dell Technologies enabling partners to be trusted advisors in APAC

For Dell Technologies, ensuring their partners are well equipped, qualified and trained with the latest knowledge on their products and solutions is imperative.

The tech partner ecosystem plays an important role in helping businesses make the right choices in their tech investments. Over the years, organizations continue to rely on input from their partners on how they can get the best solutions to ensure they are capable of improving productivity and efficiency.

For Dell Technologies, ensuring their partners are well equipped, qualified and trained with the latest knowledge on their products and solutions is imperative. As a vendor that provides solutions to almost all industries in the region, the partners’ role and relationship with customers is key for vendors to get the best business opportunities.

In a conversation with CRN Asia, Manish Gupta, Vice President for Global Alliance and Partner Ecosystem in Asia Pacific, Japan and China for Dell Technologies said the vendor continues to enable its partners with sufficient knowledge so that they can become the trusted advisor to customers. This in turn will enable partners to take advantage of all the emerging technologies and outcomes that customers are looking for.

“In my view, this is a huge opportunity for the industry and our partners. Partners have vertical and technological expertise. But how do you bring all of them together with newer technologies so that the outcomes are real for our enterprise customers? We made some changes in our partner program to simplify processes and increase our efficiency in our go to market strategy, which has been resonating well with our partners,” said Gupta (pictured below).

According to Gupta, partners in the region are seeing plenty of opportunities in the areas they are focused on. For example, AI remains a topic that is seeing impact across the board. However, Gupta pointed out that because there is such a strong fusion of AI with other emerging technologies, partners are seeing this as an opportunity as well.

“Customers are looking for use cases that can give them an ROI in the enterprise space. As such, we are seeing emergence of agentic architectures and how it will enable human-to-AI interaction. For example, we will all be managers with the agents working for us. So how do you make them real? How do you take a lot of use cases from proof of concepts (POC) to production? That's a key ask from our partners which we are addressing through our AI labs,” explained Gupta.

Dell Technologies recently unveiled partnerships in the region whereby it will be enabling partners to help businesses in developing AI use cases and moving from PoCs. This is achieved through the Dell AI factory whereby partners can get enabled on with validated use cases and they them to customers.

“Apart from our AI Labs, we’re also seeding equipment with some of our partners so that they become self-sufficient to be able to demonstrate POCs to their customers. So, it is not just enabling technology per se but also providing them with adequate care so that they can start to demonstrate those use cases through our AI labs,” added Gupta.

From POCs to Skills

At the same time, Gupta also pointed out that the lack of skills in the market is also making partners have a more critical role with their customers. Specifically, Gupta said that the vertical expertise partners have on certain fields and industries need to be merged with the emerging technologies. This allows partners to address customer needs not just from a skill shortage concern but also by adopting emerging technologies like AI.

“So, it's really going to be a world where not all the customers would have, or rather, most of the customers would not have in-house skills to take some of these AI use cases to production or even POC. And that's where partners become much more important. In fact, 70% of all of the business that's going to happen in the enterprise space will happen through partners. It’s a validation of the fact that the skills that are not available with customers or with the enterprises are going to come through the partners,” said Gupta.

For Gupta, this will enable them to achieve more depth of skills with partners. It will also help them increase their coverage in the market and be geographically much closer to customers who need our help.

“As we do that, it will position us very favorably for the future and for decades to come. And it looks pretty good. Just several weeks ago at a partner enablement session in Singapore, we got partners from across the region and enabled them on various technologies. We are constantly doing that to deepen the skills and allow our programs to reach out to more partners,” said Gupta.

In 2025, Gupta believes the opportunities in the region will all go down to how partners take on the scenarios as trusted advisors to customers. With Dell Technologies focused on simplifying the partner journey, he believes the constant evolution based on the competitive nature of the market as well as the new portfolios coming in will only help partners become better trusted advisors to customers.

“It's going to be leading with emerging technologies like AI that we will continue to have a focus on. It's a multi-generational opportunity, and for the fact that we've been at the forefront of this over the last couple of quarters and years puts us in the best position to be able to take advantage,” he concluded.