The VAR Guy

For the second consecutive quarter, Wall Street wasn’t impressed with Dell’s financial performance, but the hardware giant seems to be making continued progress with channel partners. Dell Channel Chief Greg Davis and other team members gave The VAR Guy a few updates today. Take a look.

Hewlett-Packard’s latest quarterly results, announced today, beat Wall Street’s expectations and CEO Mark Hurd is raising earnings guidance for 2010. HP sounds downright bullish. Will Michael Dell be equally bullish when Dell announces earnings on Feb. 18? Here are some clues, some of which involve Dell’s PartnerDirect partner program.

Will the real Dell please stand up? Following yesterday’s quarterly financial statement, Wall Street is bearish on Dell today. Still, Dell Channel Chief Greg Davis sounds bullish about the company’s partner program. Here are some observations.

When Dell recruited channel veteran Nancy Reynolds to run the company’s PartnerDirect global enterprise channel business, The VAR Guy wondered: What attracted Reynolds to the position? Actually, it’s a three-part answer. Here’s the scoop, based on a conversation a few minutes ago with Reynolds.

Imagine sipping a Pepsi in Coca Cola’s lobby. Or parking a Ford in GM’s executive parking lot. That’s the situation facing The VAR Guy today. In a few hours, he’ll be booting up an Apple MacBook Pro during interviews at Dell’s headquarters. Will “Hello” become a quick “Goodbye”? Hopefully not…

TheVARguy.com and MSPmentor are confirmed to interview Dell Channel Chief Greg Davis in a few days. If you have questions for Davis, feel free to email me (joe [at] ninelivesmediainc.com) or post a comment below. I hope to weave in five or more reader questions during my conversation with Davis.

When The VAR500 (formerly VARbusiness 500) was announced recently, Dell found an interesting statistic: 437 of the solutions providers on the VAR500 list have relationships with Dell. But that’s not all. Dell Channel Chief Greg Davis shared a few more partner program milestones with The VAR Guy on June 3. Here’s the scoop.

“And now, a special economic message from our channel chief.” That sums up recent moves by Microsoft, Dell and now Cisco Systems. All three companies have put their channel chiefs front-and-center with blog, podcast and video messages to partners in recent days. The latest nugget comes from Cisco Worldwide Channel Chief Keith Goodwin (pictured). Here’s the scoop (and the video).

Ummm, Dell is getting into the content business — sort of. The computer giant has published its own podcast with global channel chief Greg Davis. The first two minutes are filled with the usual “economic challenge/partner solution” chatter. Davis does offer some thoughts on where partners are succeeding but there’s barely a mention of the reseller movement toward managed services.

Following a surprise New Years Eve reorganization at Dell, the company is reaching out to partners and assuring them the PC giant remains committed to their success. Greg Davis, who makes the leap from North America Channel Chief to Global Channel Chief, offered up this blog to offer peace of mind to the channel and Dell’s PartnerDirect members.

Greg Davis, Dell’s North American channel chief, is moving up to a global post, according to the folks at ChannelInsider. Hmmm. That should silence conspiracy theorists who think Dell’s surprise New Year’s Eve reorganization could put the company’s PartnerDirect channel program at risk.