EMC Taps Partners For Services Delivery

EMC

Despite the economic slump, the demand for storage networking expertise is skyrocketing, said Russ Green, director of global services partners and alliances at EMC.

"We're seeing tremendous growth," Green said. "We need to expand our partnerships to meet the demand. EMC cannot completely organically meet that demand today. The fact is, services depend on market reach. If we can bring partners in . . . we can jointly provide impressive value to our customers."

EMC has always provided services, but until about a year or so ago, the company had no structured program or training global infrastructure to develop and manage partnerships in those services, Green said. Today, "we are looking at how to choose, develop, and deploy partners. We have joint business plans which define what they provide, what we provide, and how to get there," he said.

EMC's initial partners include services organizations such as Group Bull and Unisys; solution providers such as Collective Technologies, Logical and Dimension Data; and other partners such as Dell.

All the partners are services-oriented and will be expected to offer services that integrate seamlessly with EMC's own services offerings, Green said. "We're not going, in any way, shape or form, to sacrifice quality for quantity."

EMC will consider adding partners with strong services experience in the future, but for now, the company is looking at controlled growth, Green said.

The level of investment and the number of engineers needed to offer full services on EMC's Symmetrix, Celerra and Clariion lines is great for large, services-oriented partners, but not for the majority of partners, said Pat Edwards, vice president of sales at Alliance Technology Group, a Hanover, Md.-based EMC solution provider.

VARs such as Alliance have engineers for pre- and post-sales support and troubleshooting, Edwards said. "But if I need engineers for a week or two for services, I go to someone like Collective Technologies," he said. "We'll hire their particular specialist, tell him he represents Alliance and put him out there."

Partnering on services helps Alliance's bottom line, in most cases, Edwards said. "Collective sells its services so we can get a good margin," he said. "Veritas gets us a little piece of margin. With StorageTek, we are certified, so we get to capture 100 percent of the margin. HP, a little bit. EMC, though, gives us nada."