What's The Score?

By Joseph F.Kovar

Quick response to solution providers' needs is imperative to having a successful channel relationship—and that's not been lost on EMC Corp., winner of the 2008 VARBusiness Annual Report Card survey for the Network Storage category.

Solution providers who participated in the survey not only gave Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC the top score in the product innovation, support, and partnership subcategories, but they also gave the vendor a clean sweep of all 18 criteria in the survey, making it one of only three companies to get the No. 1 spot in all 18 criteria and the only company to do so in two categories.

EMC beat its nearest competitor, Network Appliance Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., by a large margin, while third-place IBM Corp., White Plains, N.Y., fell well behind NetApp in the survey. Hitachi Data Systems, Santa Clara, Calif., was not represented in this category because of the lack of solution provider responses to the survey.

The fact that EMC did so well does not surprise Marc Franz, national sales director of EMC and VMware solutions at FusionStorm, a San Francisco-based solution provider that works with many of the networked storage vendors covered in the survey.

Technologically, EMC has done wonders with its Clariion platform, not only in terms of its traditional Clariion line of midrange arrays but also with a new platform that lets customers work with NAS and with Fibre Channel and iSCSI SAN at the same time, Franz said.

"Customers who have EMC shops want to stay that way," Franz said. "They are ordering the EMC NAS platform. It's very price competitive and easy to add on to existing storage."

And, contrary to popular belief, EMC is not an expensive product line, which helps the channel, Franz said.

"EMC has been very, very aggressive price-wise, making it a real mover for customers," he said.

On the channel side, EMC has inside sales reps who are beating the bushes in existing and new accounts and pairing the leads with solution providers, Franz said.

Gregg Ambulos, vice president of channel sales Americas for EMC, said the success that EMC has had over the past five to six years since he joined the company comes from listening to the channel.

"It's not waving a magic wand," Ambulos said. "Our partners know we listen to them. And we're able to demonstrate we're moving forward with them."

Having world-class products will not lead to success without a world-class channel to back them up, and that is the combination which EMC offers, Ambulos said.

EMC has also enhanced channel margins by pushing a dramatic increase in the number of certified partners, and the number of certifications each partner has, Ambulos said.

It also helps that EMC's sales leadership backs the company's channel efforts 100 percent, Ambulos said.

"We put rules in place," he said. "And our sales team knows that if anyone breaks the rules, there's consequences for the individual who breaks them."

NetApp is not satisfied with being No. 2 to archrival EMC in the network storage category, and its ranking does not reflect recent changes to its channel initiatives, said Debbie Medal, senior director of channel marketing at NetApp.

"The actions we take in the channel have results all the way through our company and to our partners," she said. "The timeline is a bit wacky. The time the ARC survey is being done is the time we are rolling out new programs that haven't been implemented yet."

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