Do you want to know the secret of a successful business relationship? In my book, it’s trust, complementary skills and mutual need/benefit. Both parties need to have skin in the game, play to their strengths and be aware of each other’s expectations.
The Marketplace Is Challenging
Lofty words but how does this translate to the IT business? As technology is becoming more commoditized, companies are increasingly looking at different ways to do business, provide a better user experience, more responsive services and remain relevant.
No big surprises as to why. It’s challenging out there. Companies have a shorter window to get product to market and gain competitive advantage. Did you know that about half of the companies listed on the Fortune 500 in the year 2000 have subsequently fallen off the list and many of these no longer exist in today’s world? In my view, today’s winners are companies with a long-term view of the market while the losers are companies that stand still and fail to innovate.
Together Is Better
As a result of this market dynamic, I’m seeing customers collaborate with the team at Dell OEM to migrate from a hardware- or software-only model to a broad solutions approach. However, and this point is important to emphasize, it’s not about dabbling in what you don’t know. It’s about continuing to focus on your core strengths but developing the right alliances to add new expertise. As the saying goes, two heads are better than one.
Pelco and Dell OEM Partnership
Take the video surveillance business as a case in point. According to market reports, it’s a thriving business, enjoying annual compound growth of around eight to 10%. While it’s a fragmented market, it’s also a highly specialist niche area with about 10 significant players driving trends. Recognizing that video management and video surveillance systems are complex by nature, Pelco by Schneider Electric, a global leader in video surveillance and security products and technologies, recently launched its VideoXpert Professional VMS, powered by Dell technology.
End-Customer Benefits
From an end-customer viewpoint, the benefits of such a relationship are pretty obvious. Customers tell us that they want easy-to-deploy video surveillance solutions that are smart, scalable and flexible. With the Pelco and Dell OEM collaboration, they get an integrated, tested, validated solution from two best-in-class providers in the industry, backed up by award-winning global support. What’s not to like? Win-win!
Business Benefits for Pelco
However what about Pelco? Apart from customer benefits, are there other pluses? Are we helping Pelco navigate through the market and adapt its business model? If so, how? We talk all the time to our customers, and Pelco recently shared some great insights.
According to Pelco CEO, Jean-Marc Theolier, the collaboration is already delivering real benefits on the ground. “We now have a new, broad channel to market plus the credibility of co-branding with a global leader.”
However, innovation has been the biggest delivery. “Most importantly, the relationship has definitely strengthened our ability to deliver innovation to customers. For example, thanks to Dell’s supply chain expertise, we’ve been able to significantly reduce customer lead-times and introduce our products to market faster, gaining significant advantage over the competition.”
Dell’s global support footprint also gets the thumbs-up. According to Theolier, “We’ve found the whole process of gaining country regulatory certification much faster and easier. The quality of post-sales support is yet another unique selling point, which the competition simply cannot match.”
Meanwhile, John Roman, global VP of Strategic Accounts at Pelco, admits that he was unaware that Dell had so much existing expertise in video surveillance technology. ”I’ve been pleasantly surprised and impressed by the depth of knowledge, the way the team has collaborated with our subject matter experts plus the great resources available at the Dell OEM video labs. It’s been a real meeting of minds.”
What about the future? As Pelco is already active in adjacent non-surveillance areas like access control and POS, Theolier feels that there is good opportunity to expand market space by harnessing the Internet of Things. “Understandably, there are concerns about uptime, cybersecurity and liability. While we need to adopt a cautious, balanced approach about deploying new technologies, I am excited about the potential of IoT and believe that the benefits far outweigh the risks.”
Business Benefits for Dell OEM
On our side, Pelco has brought huge video security expertise to the table while we are both gaining from best practice sharing in production, procurement and business processes.
From a sales perspective, this relationship is also proving to be a clear winner. Let’s not forget that in today’s world, video surveillance is relevant to so many vertical industries, everyone from retail and manufacturing to airports, healthcare, finance, education, highway monitoring – you name it, they’re on the list.
As IP cameras capture more resolution, there is increasing demand for additional bandwidth, compression, intelligence, a long-term central repository to store the data for the ever-increasing retention time required, monitors to display 4K surveillance cameras in HD resolution, high-powered workstations to show video streams, virtualization to run the applications, high-end compute to run all the video streams, software to analyze the information plus the ability to take that information and derive insights from it. All this plays to our core strengths and capabilities.
For me, Pelco and Dell OEM are bringing it all together in a full stack, soup-to-nuts solution, from camera to recording systems, from client to the network through to compute, storage and into the cloud. It’s this type of collaboration that truly brings added value to both companies and to our joint customers.
Last Words
But, let’s leave the last word to Pelco. Theolier says he is optimistic and excited about the future, “I think the Dell merger is great not only for our partnership but for the broader industry. In our experience, the transition has gone incredibly smoothly with no disruption to customers. I am excited about the capacity of the combined company, the breadth of the product portfolio and the positive impact of this alliance.”
Great to hear as we celebrate our first anniversary as a combined company! I’d love to hear how you are adapting your business model to remain competitive and what we can do to help.
Watch a video about the Dell and Pelco partnership here.
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