Dell Technologies World, Las Vegas – Dell Technologies has been working to transform its longtime partner program, making it easier for partners who help bring its products to customers worldwide.
At the Dell annual partner and customer conference in May, the
company’s Chief Partner Officer, Denise Millard, had an update to share: the reimagined Dell Partner Program will launch in August, powered by AI and bringing new benefits, rewards, and improvements for partners that do business with the technology vendor.
“We have been on a multi-year journey to simplify, standardize, and automate how we work together,” said Millard as she spoke to several thousand partners in the room at Dell’s Global Partner Summit at the conference. “We are rethinking how we operate in all the areas that we do business in, with the objective of making it easier for you to do business with Dell. This is not just an incremental improvement; this is a completely new agenda and partner experience.”
Full details are still being worked out, but the new program will deliver an AI-powered platform that will make it easier for partners to enable faster deal registrations, boosted reward incentives, much easier account management, and more, said Millard.
“This is an area that you have been asking for Dell to work on for many years, and hopefully you walk away saying we listen and we take action,” she said. “We are making
significant enhancements to our program to reward partners for driving and winning outcomes in the areas that you are all having conversations with your customers about every day, [including] AI adoption, cyber resilience, and cloud modernization.”
Among the things partners have told Dell they want to see are rewards for deepening existing customer relationships by driving new business with them, not just for bringing in new customers, she said. In addition, they asked for more transparent and dynamic pricing for customers, and an online partner platform that simplifies the processes compared to the existing and kludgy platform, said Millard.
Dell is moving to listen to its partners: Analysts
Several IT analysts at the conference said that Dell’s new partner program changes show that the company is directly and wisely responding to partner feedback.
“The focused areas of opportunity for partners, and the structured incentives that reward partners for the right behaviors, will be well received,”
Steve White, channels and alliances analyst with IDC, told ChannelE2E.
“For Dell partners or any other vendor, it is important to understand where the partner sees opportunity, where Dell is investing on their behalf, and [how they will] benefit from the aligned incentives.”
White said he also sees Dell’s coming use of AI to power the new partner platform as a big benefit. “The future partner experience changes supported by AI are also exciting for partners to be able to do business more efficiently,” he said.
Another analyst,
David Linthicum, founder of Linthicum Research and a cloud and AI analyst, said he was intrigued by the combination of partner program moves that Dell unveiled.
“Dell seems to be sharpening its channel story around practical AI, not just broader infrastructure,” said Linthicum. “The key impact for partners is clearer monetization and more reasons to lead with services, integration, governance, and hybrid deployment models rather than simple product resale.”
By giving partners the ability to package AI with stronger security, compliance, and operational control, customers will benefit, said Linthicum. “That is especially relevant as Dell is tying channel momentum to its 2026 partner updates and newer agentic AI offerings.”
However, Dell still has to deliver on the promises it is making, he said.
“The strategy sounds promising, but partners need more than the vision,” said Linthicum. “They need a practical go-to-market model: how to position it, package it, deploy it, support it, and show business value quickly. If Dell wants strong partner adoption, it must translate the AI message into repeatable offerings with clear margins and customer outcomes. Otherwise, the story risks being an interesting conceptually but harder for the channel to operationalize at scale.”
Dell does appear to understand that partners need margin-rich opportunities, not just messaging, added Linthicum. “The fresh incentives should matter if they truly reward higher-value solution selling in AI, data, and services.”
Dell’s efforts to make AI more operational and deployable in hybrid and on-prem environments are also notable, he said. “That stands out because it gives partners a clearer path to wrap services, governance, integration, and security around the technology rather than just reselling infrastructure.”
Another analyst,
Alex Smith, vice president and practice lead for ecosystems, channels, and marketplaces at Futurum Research, said that the efforts Dell has made to lay the framework for its coming, improved, co-sell program are critical.
“I see this as more of a future-proofing for future engagement with solutions integrators, frontier partners, and any manner of advisory firms that influence tech without necessarily owning the transaction,” said Smith. “Co-sell is hard to execute programmatically as it can be very subjective, but Dell has established some of the necessary instrumentation and templates.”
The company is also doing an excellent job of managing its supply chain to ensure that partners can get products to sell to their customers, he said.
“It is hard to state how challenging the supply environment is out there in the world of compute today,” said Smith. “I have spent a lot of time with server channel partners this year, and it is unlike anything we have seen in the modern technology era. But Dell is among the leaders in managing this period, and at least according to one major distributor I spoke with, the outright best. Its supply chain, scale, and tools are proving to be real differentiators in an environment that is rife with uncertainty, price shocks, and elongated lead times. This phenomenon will not go away anytime in the next 18 months; Dell is well-positioned to navigate it.”
Don Gentile, a data platform and resiliency analyst for HyperFRAME Research, told ChannelE2E that Dell’s channel message about simplifying AI infrastructure projects for customers will help remove pressure for customers who have been finding the processes to be difficult.
“That should open up larger consulting and services opportunities because customers need guidance on architecture, deployment models, governance, lifecycle management, and long-term AI costs,” said Gentile. “Dell’s hybrid AI and private cloud positioning also gives partners a path to more strategic customer conversations. Instead of focusing on hardware refreshes, partners can now discuss where AI workloads should run, how to manage sensitive enterprise data, and how customers balance public cloud flexibility against long-term infrastructure costs.”
