Home
You’re currently viewing our content for All Regions.
You can switch to a different region:
August 13, 2026
Growth is rarely a difficult ambition to articulate within the technology channel – a channel armed with double-digit revenue and profitability aspirations across Australia and New Zealand.
Finding where that growth will actually come from is always the multi-million-dollar question, however.
For partners chasing another 20 or 30%, the choices are familiar – win customers that don’t buy from you today or become more valuable to the customers that already do.
Neither is easy. Both is required.
Acquisition means competing against established relationships, displacing incumbents and persuading customers to make a change. Development requires partners to broaden relevance inside accounts already won, often beyond the technologies or capabilities that established the relationship in the first place.
“Partners have to do both, don’t they?” asked Lynn Nicol, A/NZ Distribution and New Zealand Channel Leader at Dell Technologies.
A rhetorical opener that strikes at the very heart of partner expansion plans – neither strategy can carry the growth burden alone.
And Dell enters the conversation with momentum on both fronts.
The vendor’s partner ecosystem reported double-digit year-on-year growth across every line of business during the past 12 months.
Namely the Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) – housing servers, networking and storage – which reported record full-year revenue of $60.8 billion in FY26, up 40% year-over-year. Also, the Client Solutions Group (CSG) – including commercial and consumer lines – which totalled $51 billion, up 5% year-over-year.
All up, that contributed to record full-year revenue of $113.5 billion, up 19% year-over-year for the year ended 30 January 2026.
“That’s very significant and it speaks to how important and embedded our partner ecosystem is for Dell Technologies,” Nicol added. “Many of our partners are coming off the back of a very strong first six months of the year so as a market, there is certainly momentum and optimism.”
Perhaps momentum is the key word. Dell’s answer to maintain such an industry uptake is to place greater structure and investment behind two distinct partner motions – acquisition and development.
A mid-year programmatic update reflective of a fast-moving market – as shared by Denise Millard, Chief Partner Officer at Dell Technologies.
One of the most consistent pieces of feedback was that partners should be rewarded for deepening existing customer relationships, not just landing new logos. The Focus Accounts Incentive is designed to address that, recognising line-of-business expansion in both named accounts and under-penetrated accounts.
“Our Focused Account Incentives now have two distinct areas: acquisition and development,” Nicol explained.
“We’re getting our partners to line up behind those areas and putting investment behind them. The profitability for partners sits very much in those two spaces and that’s a significant change.”
Despite economic conditions, Dell believes there is plenty of market opportunity for partners willing to pursue it.
“We talk about a $6 trillion addressable market opportunity globally, with two-thirds of that – $4 billion – being channel fulfilled and delivered through partners,” Nicol said. “If you think about the successful year we had last year with our partners globally, we’ve got momentum and we see partners leaning in.”
The ecosystem mood across much of Australia and New Zealand reflects that opportunity. Although there are exceptions.
“Maybe if they’re addressing the very small or SMB market, potentially not so much,” Nicol qualified. “But largely speaking, most of the partners I speak to are enormously positive and optimistic about the market.”
That confidence is important because capturing either form of growth requires investment.
Acquisition demands sales effort without certainty of winning while development may require new skills before an existing customer awards the partner additional work. Not forgetting that AI adds another layer of experimentation and capability building.
As a growth accelerant, acquisition remains the obvious route into markets, customers and opportunities that partners currently don’t have today.
“Acquisition is definitely important,” Nicol said. “Partners obviously need to acquire customers, and we hope they acquire them with us. We’re lining up our program to support that.”
Dell has long encouraged that greenfield motion, but Nicol said the vendor has now simplified the way several acquisition programs operate.
“We’ve intentionally simplified the program, taken out some of the different terms and conditions and rules that existed around the acquisition programs, and unified that under a focused account incentive for our partners,” Nicol explained.
“That’s based on feedback from our partners around moving towards simplicity, but also helping them focus on winning together with us in that greenfield space.”
Development tackles the growth question from the other direction. Simply put, that equates to going deeper into existing accounts and leveraging cross-sell opportunities to expand portfolio reach into other lines of business.
“We’ve been shaping our partner program for some time to encourage that sort of line-of-business expansion and that cross-sell,” Nicol said.
The decision to introduce a specific development incentive also wasn’t made in isolation. Feedback through partner advisory boards reinforced the need to make expanding within existing accounts more commercially attractive.
“We’re acknowledging that we absolutely have to support and make more profitable that development incentive, so that we can win together where we’re not,” Nicol added.
The aim is to create a more balanced growth equation.
A partner may win an infrastructure opportunity with a new customer today and develop that relationship across other lines of business – such as client solutions – tomorrow. Another may already have years of history inside an account but discover an entirely new conversation through AI, devices, cyber resilience or data centre modernisation.
Acquisition creates the relationship while development expands what that relationship can become.
But Nicol’s point remains that one should not be mistaken as a substitute for the other – “for partners to grow, they have to do both.”
Powering both strategies is a revamped agentic partner experience, underpinned by AI to reduce friction and redirect focus on customer relationships and revenue-generating activity.
This includes demand signals at scale with Dell delivering more than 200,000 demand signals to partners in FY26, predicting insights on the likelihood and timing of customer purchases and helping partners prioritise the right opportunities at the right moment.
Supporting this is automated deal registration to provide approvals in “minutes, not days” as well as “dynamic and transparent pricing” housing real-time account-specific and deal-based pricing to create “fewer email loops and sharper quotes” from the start.
Also on the table is AI assistants to guide partners through the full journey from next-best-action quoting to post-order support making solutioning, purchasing and account management more “intuitive and self-serve.”
The appeal of development is obvious given that an existing customer already knows the partner. Acquisition starts without that advantage and can also mean confronting deeply embedded competitors.
“The market at the moment has some tension in the system, so yes, that can be a challenge,” acknowledged Nicol, when referencing the displacement of incumbents.
“But coming back to partners wanting to acquire and partner with Dell, the program makes it profitable to pursue that strategy. We’re really clear on that.”
For Dell, deal registration is mission-critical when vendor and partner pursue an opportunity together.
“I think the simplicity of the program, especially in the second half, makes it easier to work out where we can partner and collaborate together,” Nicol said.
“That’s where we actually do really well as a vendor in partnership with the channel — with our deal registration program. Once we do work together and we are collaborating, that is one of our strengths.
“Obviously, if we win together in that space, then it’s very lucrative for partners.”
That commercial logic matters.
Vendors can point partners towards markets they consider strategically important but partners still have to decide where to put sales resources, technical capability and investment.
Making an opportunity attractive on paper is different to making it worth pursuing.
Development carries its own challenge. Going deeper inside a customer requires something new to talk about.
For Dell partners, that can increasingly mean moving beyond the line of business through which the account was originally won.
The client refresh created one obvious opening. Nicol pointed to the opportunity for customers to upgrade to AI-enabled devices but argued that the conversation had to move beyond the hardware itself.
“There was the opportunity to upgrade with an AI-enabled device and start having conversations with partners and customers about thinking beyond simply having a button on a PC and actually using these new devices in a meaningful way,” she said.
“That took centre stage last year in terms of the workforce transformation story.”
Yet even during a major device cycle, another customer requirement never disappeared.
“Modernising the data centre never goes away,” Nicol stressed. “It’s so important.”
Partners selling solutions such as Dell Private Cloud, Dell Automation Platform, Cyber Resilience solutions, PowerStore, Z-Series networking and premium Client+ products are now also eligible for a new differentiated focus product base rebate.
“All of these continue to be very important and strategically important to us and our partners,” Nicol said.
“Customers absolutely have to be thinking along those lines around modern infrastructure. But there isn’t just one opportunity. Some partners will focus more heavily on devices than infrastructure, and vice versa.”
Instead, portfolio breadth increases the number of potential entry points into a customer and the number of conversations that can follow.
A partner can acquire through one capability and develop through another. An established specialist can broaden its footprint without abandoning what made it valuable in the first place.
To facilitate this shift, Dell is deliberately aligning its own investment accordingly.
“We’ve got the broadest portfolio in the industry, so we have to be continually reviewing, taking feedback and making sure that we’re keeping it as simple as we can,” Nicol said.
“It’s also about lining the investment for partners up against the most strategic parts of the portfolio.”
AI should theoretically make both growth engines run faster. It gives partners new conversations with customers they already serve while creating opportunities to enter accounts through entirely new requirements.
But the scale of the opportunity creates a problem of its own.
“It can be overwhelming when partners think about the size of the market and everything that potentially needs to be done,” Nicol acknowledged. “If you don’t narrow it down to having a North Star, it becomes very tricky to get on the ladder.”
Borrowing the ‘North Star’ terminology from John Roese – Global Chief Technology Officer and Chief AI Officer at Dell Technologies – Nicol advised partners to apply the concept practically when assessing what role to play in the AI conversation.
“Work out what your North Star is,” she said.
“What do you want it to do for you, and what do you want to help your customers with? Any partner that can define that in any aspect of what needs to be delivered has a shot.”
For many partners, this appears a more logical starting point than blindly building an AI practice.
The AI market stretches across infrastructure, data, applications, models, security, governance and business processes. Attempting to address all of it before doing anything risks turning opportunity into paralysis.
Nicol instead cited progress among partners prepared to narrow the problem and simply start.
“Those that have their own North Star, know the outcome they want from AI, investigate that internally and are then able to authentically consult to customers are being successful,” she shared.
“Those that are not afraid to take that next step are also becoming more important.”
And the partners already moving – even if they remain early in that process – have an advantage.
“Those that have started or are close to starting or thinking about starting, I think will be the most successful in developing either a practice or an understanding of how they can be more competitive in their own market using AI,” Nicol said.
Movement doesn’t eliminate the commercial questions, however.
“How do you scale fast enough?” Nicol asked. “If you bring in the skills to do that, how do you decide to make that investment?”
In that sense, partners have their own ROI calculations to make on AI.
“A lot of our partners, largely speaking, have had a great first half of the year and there’s a lot to be done already,” Nicol said.
“So how do you expand into this and take this on? You have to be very committed. I think it comes down to being very intentional about why you want to do it and what you want to get out of it.”
Large partners enter AI with obvious advantages. They can hire specialists, establish dedicated practices, invest ahead of demand and absorb experimentation costs that smaller businesses may struggle to carry.
Yet Nicol isn’t seeing curiosity concentrated exclusively among the ecosystem elite.
“We’ve actually seen AI adoption and development at all scales,” she said.
“When we talk about the technologists, they are often the smaller, owner-operated partners in our ecosystem who are just genuinely interested in technology. They’re people whom I would call technologists, who have been the most inquisitive throughout all of this and are problem solvers for their customers.”
Some haven’t waited for a fully formed market proposition before experimenting.
“They are the ones that have started with a GB10 and tried some things out,” Nicol said. “Even at that smaller end of the partner ecosystem, I’m definitely seeing partners try and experiment with AI.”
There is something important in that distinction because AI is routinely framed as an investment race.
Scale undoubtedly provides resources but it does not automatically provide curiosity. Nor does it guarantee that a partner will identify the right customer problem before someone smaller does.
“I see the technologists amongst the channel community being most successful in this space – our advice is to be very curious and not afraid to fail,” Nicol added.
For a smaller partner, the path into AI may therefore look very different to that of a national, regional or global provider. It may begin with one technical experiment, one internal use case or one customer problem.
That can still be enough to start.
The emphasis on internal experimentation also addresses a growing credibility problem around AI.
Customers are surrounded by AI propositions. Nearly every technology portfolio now carries an AI story, while buyers are simultaneously being asked to make decisions about infrastructure, data, security, cost and return on investment.
A partner repeating the same market narrative adds little whereas experience adds considerably more.
For Nicol, that includes partners investigating AI inside their own organisations and then using that experience to improve the quality of customer conversations.
Those partners are “able to authentically consult to customers.”
Trying the technology internally exposes the less polished side of adoption: what works, what fails, what skills are actually required, how much effort implementation takes and whether the promised productivity or commercial outcome materialises.
Nicol believes doing that internally first gives the eventual customer conversation “a much more authentic ring.”
That authenticity matters in both routes to growth.
For an acquisition opportunity, experience gives a prospective customer a reason to listen. For development, it gives an existing customer a reason to trust the partner with something beyond the relationship it already has.
AI doesn’t simply add another technology to sell. Used properly, it can broaden what a partner is credible enough to solve.
But there is an obvious temptation when a new market emerges: build capability everywhere. Nicol’s view of AI points in almost the opposite direction.
“No doubt, but I think it’s most likely that no single partner is going to be able to deliver everything end-to-end,” she said.
Instead of asking how a partner can own every component required to deliver an AI outcome, the more useful question may be which components it should deliberately own – and who can provide the rest?
“Work out who in the partner ecosystem you want to partner with so that you can collaborate not just with vendors, but with other partners,” Nicol advised. “Then work out what you can deliver together to make a difference to your own customers.”
The distinction between vendor collaboration and partner-to-partner collaboration is significant.
Technology ecosystems have traditionally been structured heavily around vendor relationships. AI demands capabilities spanning so many disciplines that horizontal collaboration between partners may become equally important.
A strong infrastructure provider may not need to build a data science organisation. A data specialist may not need to replicate deep infrastructure expertise. An organisation with deep industry knowledge may create more value by combining that expertise with another partner’s technical capabilities.
Knowing where not to invest can preserve focus while still increasing the size of opportunity a partner can address.
That can help win a new customer whose requirements extend beyond one company’s capabilities. It can equally help an incumbent partner stay relevant when an existing customer’s requirements move beyond its traditional expertise.
Collaboration becomes another way to feed both growth engines without attempting to build the entire machine alone.
As vendors ask partners to sell more broadly, learn faster and enter new technology markets, distribution has to do more than make products available.
When asked what Dell needs from its distributors – namely Dicker Data and Ingram Micro – Nicol’s answer was immediate – “activation, always.”
For Dell, that starts with ecosystem breadth on both sides of the Tasman.
“Partner breadth and recruitment into the Dell Technologies Partner Program remains very important,” Nicol said. “To do a deal registration, you have to be in the program, so we’re always looking to enrol more partners and our distributors do all of that onboarding for us.”
But recruitment is only the beginning.
“Distribution is responsible largely for enablement across our partner ecosystem,” Nicol added.
“They’re always first to do the training, enablement, certifications and competencies, and then help us roll that out. With so much change around AI and refreshing infrastructure at the moment, that’s never been more important.”
Dell has dedicated sales and pre-sales resources sitting within its distributors, with Nicol saying the vendor relies “heavily on them” for that capability.
Inventory remains part of distribution’s role, but activation increasingly determines whether a market opportunity becomes something partners can actually pursue.
A vendor can create an incentive. A new technology can create demand. Neither automatically gives thousands of partners the technical knowledge or commercial confidence required to act.
That gap is where distribution becomes notably valuable.
“If we deliver on the promise of being predictable and profitable, easier to work with, then we would hope that it will help attract new partners,” Nicol noted.
“We believe that partners really appreciate the transparency of the deal registration program and working with Dell. That collaboration, when we are engaged, has allowed us to build a lot of trust in the channel and strengthen relationships with existing and new partners.”
Behind that vendor message sits a wider commercial reality. There is no single source of partner growth waiting to be unlocked.
Some of the next 20 or 30% will come from customers that a partner does not have today. Some will come from discovering the next problem worth solving for customers it already knows.
Acquisition and development therefore require different motions but they increasingly depend on many of the same foundations: technical credibility, broader capability, commercial discipline, collaboration and a willingness to invest before every answer is known.
AI magnifies all of those requirements.
It also reinforces perhaps the most time-sensitive element of Nicol’s argument – partners don’t need to understand every part of an enormous opportunity before moving, they need to understand where they can make a difference and begin there.
“I would encourage every partner to start with AI,” Nicol said. “Lean into working with Dell and let’s capture some of that $4 trillion partner-delivered market. There’s plenty for us to focus on.”
In short, find the customers you don’t yet have and find the opportunities you haven’t yet uncovered inside the customers you do.
Two growth engines. Both need to be running.
Inform your opinion with executive guidance, in-depth analysis and business commentary.
