This month, we welcomed roughly 5,000 partners to Las Vegas for our annual Global Partner Summit – our flagship event of the year. I spent the week meeting with partners from around the globe and emphasized three main messages; we are winning, we are investing, and we are innovating. The response was encouraging. To put it simply, there’s really no reason not be partnering with Dell Technologies.

We are winning.

The momentum we’ve generated over the last year has been stellar. Already the market leader, we took even more share in data protection, even more share in hyperconverged infrastructure and even more share in external storage. Four quarters in a row of storage share gains. Furthermore, we accounted for over half the storage market growth or $1.3B¹ in 2018. We are truly defying gravity with you, our partner community!

We are investing.

At Dell Technologies, we aim to have the #1 program in the eyes of our partners. And this past year, you made more money than ever selling storage with Dell Technologies. This validates the hard work and the investments we’ve made toward designing storage programs to grow our collective businesses.

Moving forward, we will continue to invest in the programs that resonated best with all of you.

We are innovating.

Finally, we made a number of product announcements at Dell Technologies World. Our innovation engine has been working at warp speed to deliver in the areas that you told us we need to improve in.

Let’s start with cloud. Partners and customers alike have been asking us for more integrated solutions spanning the SABs and we delivered. We announced the Dell Technologies Cloud; a platform where VCF is integrated onto our VxRail products, deployable on prem. And beginning in the second half of the year, we’ll offer the Dell Technologies Data Center as a Service with the Vmware cloud on Dell EMC.

On top of all that, to deliver even more choice for our partners and customers, we’ve expanded our partnership with Microsoft and can now deliver a fully native, supported, and certified VMware cloud infrastructure on Microsoft Azure.

And what about Storage? Summarized by Jeff Boudreau here, our latest storage innovations will better enable customers to maximize the value of their data capital.

In midrange, the new Dell EMC Unity XT has been refreshed and drives 2X more IOPS with NVMe-ready architecture and delivers greater data efficiency with up to 5:1 data reduction.

In high end, Dell EMC PowerMax, now delivers even better performance and will be the first true scale-out storage array² to ship with Intel Optane DC drives used for persistent storage by year end. Also, PowerMax has expanded automation and container support.

In unstructured, the latest Isilon OneFS 8.2 provides up to 75% greater capacity and performance to support the most demanding file workloads, enhanced cloud integration with Google Cloud and Alibaba and increased security.

In data protection and data management, the new Dell EMC PowerProtect Software platform and the multi-dimensional Dell EMC PowerProtect X400 appliance (an industry first!) deliver simplified management, multi-cloud protection, automation services and cyber recovery. ​

Safe to say, our position in the marketplace is the strongest it’s ever been and our portfolio just further expands upon what we can offer our customers. There’s no better time to partner with Dell Technologies. And as Michael Dell said in his keynote, “this is just the pregame show!”

[1] IDC, ESS Tracker, March 2019

[2] Based on Dell EMC 2019 internal testing of the Dell EMC Unity 650F with the Dell Unity XT 880F @ 8K block size for 100% Reads, 100% Writes, and 70:30 mixed R/W