It was nice to see this article today by Scott Campbell of ChannelWeb. Skeptics like Xenochron find it difficult to believe that we are doing as much as we can to grow the channel, but we are. FWIW, I've since connected with Xenochron on an email back channel and we had a good conversation. His company decided not to buy from EqualLogic after the acquisition was announced last year, believing that Dell would wreck EqualLogic. That hurt a little bit, but I understand – people haven't alway had good feelings about Dell. He told me if the big company machine doesn't screw us up too much we will be in the running for the next purchase. All I can say is we'll see you later, Xenochron.
But Dell is changing and it is good to be a part of that change, both in the channel business as well as in the storage business. Dell's acquisition of EqualLogic was a strategic move and as the Dell EqualLogic storage business grows, people will see how important it was to Dell's new vision. It was great to see the early results yesterday but there is still a long way to go.
As an insider I'm very encouraged to see quotes like this from the ChannelWeb article:
"It was more about them listening to us. They did a brief introduction,
opened up with a presentation and then after the first slide, it turned
into a discussion," said Tim Hebert, president and CEO of Atrion
Networking, a Warwick, R.I.-based solution provider. "They let the
whole thing play out to get the feedback they were looking for. You had
three or four people running it, but another 20 people were writing
notes, listening. After the break, they were coming up to get more
clarity and detail. They came across like they don't have all the
answers."