Selling Dell: vendor tops HPE, IBM and others in storage partner mindshare stakes
Among the major enterprise storage brands, Dell resellers are best at generating traffic via search optimisation, finds research by The Channel Company
All major vendors rely on channel partners (resellers, distributors, managed service providers, integrators) in order to scale and serve different types of customers.
Enterprise storage vendors are no different. How well they perform in terms of market share and earnings is dependent, often to quite a large degree, on the number of channel partners they have and how those partners choose to promote their products.
There are many ways in which partners try to attract new customers, but SEO remains a key part of most multichannel marketing strategies. How much effort a reseller puts into getting customers into the top of the "sales funnel" for a vendor is an indicator of that vendor's "mindshare" with its resellers, which should ultimately have an impact on market share, although there are several other factors at play.
Independent research into channel partners' SEO activities, carried out in May by The Channel Company across the US, UK and Germany for storage vendors HPE, Dell Technologies, Pure Storage, IBM, NetApp and Lenovo, found some significant differences in the way resellers use search to create interest for those vendors' storage products.
The study looked at Google search optimisation activities among 1,878 channel partners to understand three metrics: (1) intent, the percentage of the partner sample optimising their search for a specific brand; (2) traffic generation, the percentage of partners who attracted visitors as a result of those SEO efforts; and (3) the average monthly traffic per partner related to those products, which is an indicator of the viability of the effort for the partner to have intent to attract visitors.
Dell ahead of the curve
The research found that Dell's channel partners are the most effective overall at promoting that brand's storage products across all three territories, US, UK and Germany. Dell has more channel partners than its competitors, those partners exhibit greater intent to attract visitors, and are more successful in driving traffic for Dell storage products.
Dell, of course, is a long-established player in enterprise storage. Newer vendor Pure Storage (founded 2009) was also doing well for mindshare, with visitor numbers per partner 1.5-2.5 times higher than competitors in the US.
Figures for intent, the percentage of partners optimising SEO for Pure Storage, were also favourable. HPE and NetApp, meanwhile, came in slightly behind Pure Storage in terms of partner mindshare.
"While NetApp can boast the second-highest number of visitors generated per partner, and by a significant amount, it and HPE have roughly comparable numbers of partners generating intent and traffic, basically making them almost head to head with Pure Storage," said Tamina Carvell, global director analytics and insights at The Channel Company.
Better known for its end user devices, Lenovo is a more recent entrant to enterprise storage, but one that is rising in leaps and bounds in terms of market share for storage. The relatively low SEO figures among Lenovo partners therefore represents an opportunity.
"There is room for growth both in terms of number of partners that will see a benefit in participating in [Lenovo's] storage ecosystem and eventually the market share that can come with this. This should not be such unexpected news to the community, given that Lenovo has made strides in the storage market and is seeing some success there," Carvell said.
Meanwhile, Germany's IBM partners are more successful in generating interest than those in the US and the UK, IBM being a trusted brand for some customers of its on-premise storage products in that country.
In the UK, only Dell and HPE see significant search optimisation among its channel partners, suggesting that other types of demand generation activities are more prevalent. Or that UK resellers are missing a trick.
Storage - the Cinderella of the stack
Unlike, for example, public cloud services, where there is a battle royal for attention with more than 70% of channel partners using SEO to lure more visitors, enterprise storage, with a corresponding figure of 10-15%, is a low-key affair.
Nevertheless, storage is a core component of every enterprise stack, and storage vendors should spend more time convincing their partners of their value.
"[The fact that they promote cloud] proves that a lot of these same partners can and do produce vendor specific content at volume, provided that they see a benefit in telling that story to their customers. The onus of making that benefit apparent to partners is on the vendors themselves," said Andrejs Bogdanovs, programme manager for data science and market intelligence.
Principal consultant Vladyslav Kostyuk added that content and search is often neglected in areas like storage by both vendor and partner alike.
"A lot of partners do not produce vendor specific content for their websites. This is not surprising, as executing an ongoing content strategy is hard. Nonetheless, if partners are not writing content about a specific vendor and not positioning them as a key component of their story to their potential customers - how much of their mindshare does that vendor have and where else might the partner have content gaps when they go to market?"
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