"Those products are vulnerable," said one top Dell EMC partner, who did not want to be identified. "This program makes you more money to take them out than you would get selling those products independently. This is going to marginalize third and fourth tier OEMs."

The new program over the long term could eventually lead to a significant shift in sales and technical resources away from Cisco or HPE toward Dell EMC, partners said. "That issue of displacing a major OEM is probably a year away," said one solution provider executive, who did not want to be identified.

Dan Serpico, CEO of FusionStorm, No. 49 on the CRN SP500, said the program allows Dell EMC to go toe-to-toe with Cisco in the data center.

"It clearly puts them on even footing with Cisco," Serpico said. "There are some opportunities with Cisco that are better, and there are things in the Dell EMC program that are better. I like that the Dell EMC program is a one-year plan rather than a six-month plan so you can invest in the longer term. 

"They both have great programs, and to say I would choose, I might say I would choose this one first. Being able to invest for the longer term is clearly a tiebreaker, and we're looking forward to the portal being up and running. The tracking will be better, we'll be paid faster than with the Cisco plan, and there's significant upside to that."

Sonia St. Charles, CEO of the Davenport Group, a St. Paul, Minn.-based solution provider that sits on the vendor's partner advisory board, said she sees only upside to the new program even for smaller partners like Davenport Group.

"We hadn't anticipated that the rebate program would be nearly this rich, and I hadn't conceived that they'd be able to level the playing field between a company my size and a much larger EMC solution provider," she said.

Scott Winslow, CEO of the Winslow Technology Group, a Waltham, Mass.-based solution provider that works with Dell EMC, said the program makes it clear that partners must grow, and they must do it by taking business from Dell EMC's main data center rivals.

"They're very clear on what behavior they're going to reward, growing new business and growing new business in the enterprise, in storage, servers and networking," Winslow said. "And that means we'll have to take it away from HPE, take it away from IBM. If you can add new lines of business, if you can add accounts, they're going to reward that. If you can add services, sell services, they're going to reward that. They keep beating that drum."

The program stresses storage, server and PC product lines with stackable rebates paid from the first dollar. Those rebates nearly double legacy EMC payouts while pushing solution providers to win new business and sell across the company's entire portfolio. And thanks to what Dell EMC Global Channel Chief John Byrne characterized as "tens of millions" of dollars in investment, the new rebate system – including an online calculator and tracking – is fully automated.

Dell EMC has provided two paths to advance through the program's Gold, Platinum and Titanium tiers. One track is for partners that book big revenue while selling a limited number of product lines. The other is for partners that sell a wider range of products but book less revenue.