Six months have passed since Dell completed its takeover of SonicWall, which gave birth to independent outfit, Dell SonicWall.
Dell SonicWall vice-president, Richard Ting, admits that the move resulted in “a bit of a transition” for SonicWall as it meant it would be integrated into the larger Dell organisation.
“At the time we were acquired, SonicWall was almost a US$300 million company and Dell does US$62 billion annually,” he said.
“SonicWall also consisted of about 1000 people, and now that we have joined Dell, there are over 112,000 people.”
By going into a much larger organisation, Ting concedes there were some concerns within the channel community, as SonicWall had up to that point always been a 100 per cent channel company.
Dell it is a different business, as it has a hybrid model that consists of a very big direct sales team with a channel business as well.
“The concern among the SonicWall channel community was really around whether SonicWall would sell direct,” Ting said.
He said the vendor has continually addressed those types of concerns from its partners, but overall the experience has been “very positive.”
Life with Dell
As for what benefits have come out of the deal, Ting says being part of a much larger company with Dell has really enabled SonicWall to reach a lot of enterprises that did not necessarily consider their solutions in the past.
“A lot of the mindset among businesses was that we were more of an SMB play,” he said.
“That was true for a long time, as that’s where SonicWall’s focus primarily was.”
However, over the last two or three years, Ting says SonicWall has been focusing much more on the enterprise side of the business.
SonicWall has had some success in that area, but Ting admits that overall progress has been slow because “it takes time to build up credibility.”
“Joining Dell has really helped us to accelerate a lot of that, because Dell has a lot of access to enterprises,” he said.
For one, it has allowed SonicWall to go in and say they are part of a larger company.
There is also Dell’s instant brand recognition across the enterprise base, and Ting points out that some 97 per cent of Fortune 500 companies are using or have bought from Dell in the past.
“They have a great presence within the enterprise space, and that is something we’ve seen enable us to get to new areas that we couldn’t in the past,” he said.
“So that has been positive from the SonicWall side.”
