NEW YORK: Dell Security has launched a 50 percent instant rebate program on Dell SonicWall TZ and NSA appliances in a drive to boost the market momentum the company says it has gained in recent quarters.
The Round Rock, Texas, company unveiled the rebate program at its Dell Security Peak Performance 2015 event in Las Vegas on Monday. The event, sponsored in part by CRN’s parent, The Channel Company, attracted about 700 of Dell’s worldwide partners.
Specifically, the program gives Peak conference attendees working with distributors Ingram Micro, Securematics, Tech Data, D&H Distributing and Synnex the opportunity to get a 50 percent instant rebate on certain Dell SonicWall TZ and NSA appliances sold Sept. 1-11.
The rebates are designed as signals to channel partners that Dell Security is growing at a good clip and committed to the channel as its primary sales strategy.
“We’re feeling the growth, and now we’re selling Dell products along with SonicWall,” said Michael Gray, director of network operations at Tewksbury, Mass.-based Dell partner Thrive Networks. Gray said Thrive’s Dell business is growing by “strong single digits” annually, and is seeing “a ton of growth in the midmarket and enterprise.”
“And now, even smaller customers want the bigger firewalls, and they’re more expensive,” Gray said. “They want bigger and better and faster, and they don’t care as much about how much it costs, because they’re relying on it more heavily. It was like pulling teeth a few years ago, but now they can’t get enough. They don’t even look like sales opportunities anymore. They’re just simple transactions.”
Those transactions, Gray said, are displacing competitors, including hardware stalwart Cisco, Gray said.
“We’re not seeing any kind of slowdown,” Gray said. “The economy is driving it. We’re getting in front of deals we weren’t getting before. Customers who were Cisco customers are now saying, ‘We want you to sell us a SonicWall.’ ”
According to Dell, 12,000 partners sold SonicWall products in the past 12 months. In that same time, the number of deal registrations increased 7 percent, to more than 4,100 per quarter, and the number of partners submitting deal registrations increased 12 percent, to 1,300 per quarter.
Dell also said 8,700 partners representing 1,700 partner companies took network security courses in that time period, and 320 partners earned Dell’s network security competency, lifting the total number of Dell Preferred- and Premier-level partners to 1,500.
