I was honored to participate as a keynote speaker at Dell’s Peak Performance event recently. While this event has traditionally focused on providing deep technical training for our partner community, we raised the bar this year. We worked with more than 490 partners in attendance to dig deeper and really understand what’s driving their business today, and how Dell Security solutions, especially the Dell SuperMassive 9800 next-gen firewall launched last week, can help them – and thereby our customers– succeed.
In speaking with a variety of partners at the show, it’s clear that there are more opportunities than ever before for them to use Dell security solutions to add value and services for their customers. Consider the feedback below from partner Michael Ellison, vice president of sales, Virtual Graffiti, Inc.:
“One of the highlights at Peak Performance was attending the Partner Council meeting, where I got some time to interact with Dell’s executives and some of the top producing resellers from around the country. Our long-standing partnership with Dell SonicWALL has been very successful. Their products have an easy-to-navigate user interface, leading edge features and rock solid functionality. These factors shorten sales cycles and enable Virtual Graffiti to provide best-of-breed security solutions to our customer base.”
As a former CIO, I know from personal experience that security is the one issue – more than any other – that keeps IT people up at night. Interestingly, even though making sure systems and data are secured is critical to every organization’s success, security also is routinely regarded as a barrier to both success and productivity. With threats coming from every direction – the network, technology (think mobile, cloud, Internet of Things), the multitude of devices and changing ways users work, every organization, no matter what size, must have a security strategy that can protect on all these fronts. The key, however, is to provide this security in a way that keeps data centers agile, scalable, manageable, and cost-effective, with zero downtime. Security needs to enable the business, instead of standing in the way of success.
This is something I talked about with many partners at the show, and the good news is that Dell Software can help our partners and their customers flip the notion of “security as a business disrupter “on its head. Dell security solutions are built to protect, comply and enable the business, and our portfolio of security solutions – which, as I noted above, includes the new SuperMassive 9800 next-gen firewall – offers easy deployment, enabling our partners to work with their customers to achieve quick time-to-value. The SuperMassive 9800 is the most powerful model in our SuperMassive 9000 Series, with scalability that fits the security needs of businesses of any size, and performance that boosts productivity and competitive advantage. Its recent launch garnered significant media interest worldwide, including this from Mark Cox of ChannelBuzz.ca:
“The 9800 becomes the most powerful model in Dell’s SuperMassive 9000 Series, but its real significance comes from its being a scaled down version of the top-of-the-line SuperMassive 10000, for a tiny fraction of the price.”
At Dell, our focus is customer-centric, and that’s reflected in a Security portfolio that spans across all of our business units to offer effective, scalable services and solutions that protect customers from the endpoint to the datacenter to the cloud. Working with Dell, partners can offer cutting-edge identity and access management, network, and mobile security solutions that earn the respect of their customers and build credibility – both of which lead to more opportunities to do business.
A critical part of my role as vice president and general manager of Dell Software Sales and Marketing is to engage our partners and understand how we can help them be successful. I was thrilled at the opportunity the Peak Performance event provided to strengthen these relationships, which will be critical to Dell Software’s success. I want to thank all of the partners who took the time to speak with me there, and I look forward to speaking with more of our partners and customers at Dell World and the Dell User Forum, next week in Austin!