Dell has finally spoken out about its appointment of CMS Peripherals and the plans to take its EqualLogic storage range to a wider community of resellers.
Last week it emerged that CMS had started working with Dell, becoming the second EqualLogic distributor in the UK following the appointment of Hammer at the start of 2009, as exclusively revealed by MicroScope.
The US vendor said it had needed to rubber stamp the distribution contract before it could openly discuss the channel expansion blueprint.
"The UK market place is comprised of around 7,500 resellers and with the best will in the world you are never going to be able to reach all those partners, or go through the process of identifying and acquiring a pipeline of partners," said Paul Harrison, Dell UK country manager for partner direct.
He said CMS sold systems from alternative vendors including HP Letfhand Networks to resellers that have a focus on iSCSI or virtualised storage environments, "and they are the partners we are looking to on board."
There are a handful of configurations in EqualLogic's 4000 and 6000 series and the plan is to closely monitor inventory levels held by CMS and Hammer.
"EqualLogic works on relatively aggressive leads times, rather than doing one purchase at the start of a fiscal quarter, distributors will buy in comparatively small increments," said Harrison.
Joe Fagan, CMS group product marketing manager said it had been talking to Dell since it acquired EqualLogic and had "always wanted to have its technology in the portfolio".
The UK iSCSI market grew 10.5% to $22.7m during the third quarter as the rest of the storage market was negatively impacted by the recession; market leader EqualLogic accounted for 36.9% share, compared to HP in second with 22%.
"Over 50% of iSCSI applications are going into virtualised server environments," said Eric Sheppard, IDC programme director for European disk storage research, who added iSCSI price comparisons with Fibre Channel remained favourable.
The addition of CMS comes amid complaints from some Dell EqualLogic Registered resellers of losing deals to its direct sales force.
"The direct sales issues are ongoing," said one disgruntled Registered reseller, "it's a mess and we are banging our head against the wall."
Another said EqualLogic's technology was of interest to resellers but some had decided to become less active members of its channel.
"There should be hundreds of EqualLogic resellers in the UK but quite a few have become disillusioned [due to its hybrid model]," said one insider.
The sentiments among Certified partners that buy direct from Dell are quite different but as one pointed out, "we have gone through the accreditations and therefore we are closer to Dell."
Harrison said he had not been made aware of any outstanding issues of channel conflict with partners and argued its deal registration tool has minimised instances.
Hammer was unavailable to comment.
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