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EMC also rolled out EMC Cooperative Services, its first series of services designed specifically for channel partners.
These are based on services developed by EMC Global Services including health checks and performance assessments, and will give new capabilities to partners who cannot deliver those services now, said Jason Mundy, EMC's director of global services marketing.
However, Mundy said, partners had better be prepared to invest in services-related skills before expecting EMC to back them up.
"It doesn't make sense to just give [partners] the recipe of how to do this unless they make the investment in the tools and the expertise," he said.
Under the program, a solution provider engages with the customer to do analysis and gather information related to services, and then works with EMC to develop and implement the appropriate services, Mundy said.
"In doing that, [partners] can maintain the face in the relationship to the customer," he said. "They own the contract. They own the delivery. They own the entire engagement and the relationship. ... In the end, they can scale their services bench without having to make a heavy investment."
Solution providers can either brand the services as their own or they can use the EMC brand. The solution provider sets its own prices for the services.
To offer EMC Cooperative Services, solution providers must be at the Premier or Signature level in the vendor's Velocity channel program, and must show EMC they have competency in the service, including the ability to sell and position the service and collect the appropriate data.
EMC initially plans to have between 12 and 15 services ready to go for partners, including unified storage health checks and backup services around Avamar and NetWorker, and will add more advanced capability over time, including virtualization and the cloud.
EMC Cooperative Services is a program for which Sigma Solutions has been looking, said Rick Eddings, vice president of professional services at The Colony, Texas-based solution provider.
Customers understand the value of storage solutions from EMC but struggle with issues such as how to tune storage for their environments, Eddings said.
"We can provide them peace of mind," he said. "With services help from EMC, customers know they won't run into problems later."
Eddings said that he has found EMC to be his most strategic vendor in the year since he joined Sigma Solutions, and that includes the importance EMC places on bringing his company into services opportunities.
"This is especially true when customers are looking for services in multivendor situations," he said. "EMC will proactively bring us in to the customer."
NEXT: EMC Helps Partners Build Private Or Public Clouds
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