Suresh Reddy Shankar
General Manager, GCC,
Dell India 

How has been your journey in the IT industry?

A management professional with over 13 years of Sales & Marketing experience, he has worked across diverse industries like IT hardware, Software and Solutions. He is a certified Quality Green Belt and is highly experienced in Business Process Improvement. At present, he leads Dell’s Global Commercial Channel(GCC) business in India. The business has seen significant initiatives under his leadership, including ramp-up of the commercial channel, entry into newer segments and verticals.

What is the need of having GCC? How big is the team?

From where we started GCC and what we are today, we have real significant improvements. The new GCC structure, with its single point of contact for partners, will lead to higher productivity and improved time cycles and enable more customized programmes to support the partners in the market. The new structure will protect partner profitability by bringing consistent pricing across different Dell commercial businesses and offer the partners increased growth opportunities with solution-centric offerings and a broader end-customer base. Currently, our team taking care of GCC internally comprises of around 140 members. We have seven RSMs (Regional Sales Managers), so that they can keep the pace of engagement with the partners steady. 

This commercial gamut comprises of starting from client to datacenters. It involves anything ranging from desktop, laptop, server, storage, networking stack, applications and services.

Tell us about the channel network support?

In general, we have three categories of partners – Premium, Preferred and Registered. We do not have a product-centric national distributor, but in the case of small deployment and entry-level storage products we do have national level distributor taking care of that part. We have a lot of plans for increasing our team, and more so towards partner enablement. 

Our GCC initiative has been well received by our partners.

What makes Suresh connect better with channel?

I still consider myself very young in the industry. And though I have been in touch with channels, still I feel there is a lot to be known from the channels. I always have that urge in me “What I should do to connect more and better with the channels?” Channel has been there for a very long time and I feel that, because of their strengths and capabilities, they have evolved and fought back the business challenges off and on. 

They are so open to changes and readily learn and adapt the technology and are able to sell it to the customers too. I salute to their “energy” and never say no approach to “Learning”.