New Storage Wars

What EMC and the other major players must remember is that ultimately it is a channel battle, not a technology one. Computer Associates, for its part, will fire back this week with a new supercharged channel program.

The Legato acquisition will bring EMC not only a powerful lineup of software assets to rival offerings from red-hot Veritas Software and underdog CA but, more importantly, a full-fledged software channel. The importance of that Legato channel cannot be overestimated as EMC attempts to take down Veritas and battle CA and IBM Tivoli in the high-end software market.

Legato provides EMC with about 400 software channel partners, a channel-neutral compensation model for its 500 sales reps and a channel chief,Executive Vice President and COO David Beamer,who reports directly to Legato CEO David Wright. Another sign of Legato's channel depth is its distribution lineup, including Arrow Electronics, Bell Microproducts, Ingram Micro and Tech Data, and specialized distributors such as Mackin Imaging and Optical Laser. Make no bones about it,EMC is transforming itself into a storage software solutions company.

The sleeper in the storage software battle that may wake up both Veritas and EMC is CA. In our cover story this week, CRN Section Editor Jennifer Hagendorf Follett takes a look at CA's new channel strategy. Hats off to CA channel chief George Kafkarkou and his team for putting together a channel program that is absolutely best-in-class. Look at every critical measure of a channel program and CA has upped the ante,from no-cost certification and training to free support to a set of rebates across its entire product set that has the potential to dramatically increase the sales and profits of partners in every segment of the market.

CA,which has a wide range of software products that span a healthy chunk of the market, including security,understands that the battle is going to be won in the channel sales trenches, and the vendor has put together a program that has the potential to put more feet on the street than either EMC or Veritas. That is a critical differentiator as the software storage battle heats up.

Who are you betting on in the storage war? Let me know at (781) 839-1221 or via e-mail at [email protected].