What's The Score?

By Joseph F. Kovar

EMC over the past few years has set a couple of lofty goals for itself: to be one of the leading storage software vendors, and to be known as a channel-friendly vendor partner.

If the results of the latest 2008 VARBusiness Annual Report Card survey are any indication, EMC Corp., with an overall score of 87, has succeeded on both accounts thanks to solution providers' giving the vendor top marks across the board.

Solution providers gave EMC, Hopkinton, Mass., the highest mark in all 18 criteria in the survey, and as a result, the vendor dominated the Storage Management Software category, beating second-place finishers Hewlett Packard Co., Palo Alto, Calif., and IBM Corp., White Plains, N.Y., by nearly 20 points, one of the highest winning margins in the entire survey.

Pete Koliopoulos, EMC's vice president of global channel marketing, said his company has in the last 18 months been focusing on the ease of doing business and on profitability for solution providers, resulting in innovative products and services for the channel.

On the services side, EMC has recently changed its compensation plans to make it easier for partners to implement the vendor's services, shortened the time needed to get certified to implement those services, and provided them with presales and postsales support, Koliopoulos said.

EMC has also enhanced its deal registration program to improve how partners get paid, and added other ways to improve the ease of doing business with the vendor, he said. "So, while we have great products, it's all the things we do around them, including decreasing direct sales friction, that help make it easier for partners to do business with us," he said.

EMC last year also introduced a new specialization program to help solution providers focus on implementing solutions instead of selling products. Koliopoulos said EMC already has three specializations in place and may add another three in January, with more to follow.

EMC has also continued to innovate on the product side, with a special focus on adding server virtualization technology to such products as Replication Manager or its Avamar deduplication software, Koliopoulos said. "When you look at dedupe, at how to do it across multiple virtual machines, we understand how to do it," he said.

Acquisitions have also been important to EMC to fill out its product portfolio, Koliopoulos said. "When looking at how to establish an information infrastructure, we look at what we can buy and what we can develop to build ourselves," he said. "Acquisitions are equally important as our own development. A lot of our software comes from acquisitions."

Keith Norbie, director of the storage division of Nexus Information Systems, a Plymouth, Minn.-based solution provider and EMC partner, said the vendor has made it easier to create a software business than any other vendor.

"Not only does EMC offer the best channel program, they also provide the marketing dollars to jump-start the business," Norbie said. "And they provide the tools we need to create a phenomenal business for their software and compete against other vendors who help their partners see a product without thinking about the entire solution."

Symantec, which had the poorest performance in the Storage Management Software category, knows there are a lot of issues where the company needs to catch up to the leaders, said Julie Parrish, former vice president of Symantec's global channel office.

"The good news is, we're not surprised by the results," Parrish said.

Symantec has in the last few months put together a high-level task force headed by COO Enrique Salem that meets every two weeks to look at the company's channel business and make meaningful changes, Parrish said.

A lot of these processes have only been in the works for the past six to eight months. "Partners will want to test us to see if the next few products come out meeting their standards for quality and tech support," Parrish said.

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