EMC hopes its Business Partner programme will boost confidence and bring benefits to the channel.
So said Roel-Jan Mouw, EMC's director for channel marketing: EMEA, in an interview with ITWeb yesterday, who added that the programme is set to replace the Velocity partner programme.
During its Global Partner Summit in Las Vegas last month, EMC announced plans to replace the various Velocity programmes with a combined partner programme that will brand all of the company's partner base as EMC Business Partners, said Mouw.
"We are revamping the Velocity partner programme; we are changing the programme in order for it to become partner-centric. Velocity doesn't say much about our partners. So we want them to have a programme that will talk about them," Mouw said. "So, after realising the value partners are bringing to the company, we decided to launch the EMC Business Partner programme to replace the Velocity programme. The Business Partner is one brand we are going to give to all partners."
EMC wants to ensure the partners that are contributing to the business by specialising in specific products or verticals will start getting some recognition, said Mouw, revealing that the changes were due to the fact that the channel plays a crucial role in the company's overall revenue generation.
"If you look at the history, EMC was a company that sold its solutions directly to the market. But over the last two to three years, focus shifted more to the channel," he said. For the first time as an organisation, he added, EMC has passed the 50% threshold on business that comes through the channel. And in EMEA, the channel is contributing almost 60% of the revenue.
The goal over the past two to three years has been to grow the business by four percentage points each year, Mouw revealed. "We really see an opportunity to grow in the mid-market segment. Though we are not the market leader in the mid-market, we have a chance to capitalise in this market. However, in the enterprise space, we are clearly the leaders."
He also pointed out that EMC has set up several initiatives over the past couple of years to work with partners in mid-market accounts. "For the first time, we have put in place rules of engagement with partners in the mid-market. We are also strongly recommending our own sales teams to work together with the partners. This is in order to create clarity and commitment from both our teams as well as partners.
"We have a lot of focus on cloud computing and VSPEX, where we are working with specific alliances such as Cisco, VMware and Brocade. With VSPEX, we are helping our partners deliver proven infrastructure to the market."
According to Mouw, the VSPEX offering is tailored to mid-market organisations. However, large enterprises can also benefit from it, depending on how they are set up.
"In the past 12 months, we have sold over 2 200 VSPEX units worldwide through the channel, which was way off our expectations. We only sell VSPEX via the channel because we have seen that [partners] can add a lot of value, not only to EMC, but to the end-users as well.
"Our partners also deliver service and skills that we do not, per se, have. In our partner network, we have a lot of partners with various competencies, be it SAP or Oracle; we will never have that."
"As we now see that the demand for VSPEX is really there, we are now accelerating it with applications like Microsoft SharePoint, etc. Typically, these are applications that mid-market organisations are using very broadly."
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