If you can't buy the person, buy the company they work for. That's been Dell's course of action in many cases past, and just recently they purchased a small reseller by the name of ACS. While the company didn't produce enormous amounts of cash or potential for Dell, they had many consultants and other employees that worked for the company whom Dell could not buy off.
Analysts said Dell had resorted to acquisitions in order to hire the consulting staff they couldn't recruit conventionally. Dell wanted to sell the infrastructure services that were normally supplied by independent resellers, said Kate Hanaghan, a support services analyst at Ovum Holway. But as it was a hardware company, it had trouble persuading services staff to join.
Dell tries to avoid resellers as much as possible, but no matter how big they are they won't be able to reach every pocket on the globe. It seems when they can't, they are opting to just buy everyone out. Pushing that agenda further, they have recently canceled the ability for resellers to get bulk discounts, making local sales harder for those companies. Interesting.