Dell partners remain optimistic amid IT component supply chain concerns

Dell Technologies World, Las Vegas: Since mid-2025, channel partners and IT vendors have been watching with worry as component prices rise and supplies tighten in the computer memory market, fueled by huge demands for memory and other parts to satisfy the rapid pace of new data center construction.   

But for Dell partners, the worries may be more muted due to the company's long and close ties with component manufacturers and suppliers around the world, according to several partners who spoke with ChannelE2E at the annual Dell Technologies World conference in May.  

"It's the broad portfolio that they have, the buying power across clients and servers, and all the memory that goes into storage that they have amassed, the relationships with all these suppliers," said Bob Olwig, the executive vice president of global partner alliances for World Wide Technology (WWT), a longtime Dell partner and technology reseller.

"I give [Dell CEO] Michael Dell and [chief operating officer] Jeff Clarke a lot of credit because they are telling it the way it is, that this is going to be a challenge for the next several years. It is not going away anytime soon, so they work with partner resellers like WWT to try to figure out [what the market] will look like over the next two or three years. I feel confident that Dell will try to do its best to meet that customer demand, especially for their large enterprise customers."

For WWT's customers, being able to get the hardware and services they need for their business operations is critical, said Olwig, which is why its relationship with Dell is so critical to their success. "I think Dell has the best supply chain in the world, and that is being brought to bear when customers are making decisions, especially with the memory and the chip shortage that is occurring right now."

Another partner, Holland Barry, the global field chief technology officer for cloud and infrastructure at DXC Technology, a global system integrator (GSI), told ChannelE2E that he continues to hear about "the levers that Dell is pulling to help ease, to the extent possible, some of the supply chain dynamics" throughout the industry. "There is a lot of talk about that."

For DXC Technology, having a tight partnership with Dell is a huge boon, said Barry, because his company stays updated about Dell innovations and products before they are announced and released.

"What is great is our engineers working with Dell engineers on roadmap items and collaborating to create positive outcomes for customers," said Barry. "It is one thing to sit on Teams and Zoom calls together, but it is another thing to be shoulder to shoulder in the room and co-creating outcomes that are a confluence of both of our road maps."

Justin Griffin, president of Computacenter North America, a value-added reseller (VAR), said the conference reinforced the discussions his company has with Dell on a daily basis as a major partner. But what really stood out, he said, was the power and breadth of Dell's product portfolio from the smallest endpoint devices all the way up to the Dell NVIDIA NVL server and supercomputer architecture.

"So, you have got a tiny box the size of a Rubik's cube all the way up to a supercomputer that is the size of multiple refrigerators, and it all runs the same architecture and platform to support AI workloads," said Griffin. "That is the beauty of it, because Dell Technologies is the only one that has that full story."