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But very often in life, it takes time. When you do something different, it takes time for the market to absorb it. And VCE was fundamentally different.
If copy-catting is the sincerest form of flattery, then we’re being flattered. Because everyone’s trying to build one, whether it be Dell or HP or IBM. But we did it first. And it’s different. And any time you do something different, and the field’s gotta make its numbers every quarter, it’s like, “Ah, I don’t know if I can deal with the different things.”
And then, of course, how do you make a uniform product that big, that converged, when in effect it comes out of three different companies? It took us a while to get it down. And I’m telling you, now we’ve got it. It’s doing wonderfully. But it’s aimed at bigger customers, right? We’re bringing Vblock down [market], but the initial Vblocks for a long time, you had to be of [a certain] size. So you’re hearing more noise from smaller guys. And that’s where VSPEX comes in.
But I’m telling you, the success we’re having is phenomenal. And I’m very pleased. And we have big investments. And John and I would not put big investments in this unless we thought it had great future. And it does. And it will.
So we’re now basically covering the waterfront. So for the Cisco people in the channel that are selling smaller ... there’s a lot of channel emphasis with VCE now. But it took longer because it was more complex, more differentiated. And that took a while for the channel.
We actually took out complexity. But for a while [the channel] said, this looks a whole lot more complex. It takes a while to get used to it, and get a rhythm. But it’s doing wonderfully now.
And there’s still this need down here [in the midmarket], but we’ve covered it, and we’ve covered it in a much more agile way than, say, NetApp has covered it with the FlexPod. A much more agile way.
CRN: Has any compensation changed now that you’ve got VSPEX and VCE? Does EMC need to compensate direct or channel sales differently to encourage better collaboration with VCE or the Cisco reps?
Tucci: We wouldn’t be doing two-thirds of our sales in the midtier through the channel if the compensation wasn’t working. Because we still have a big direct sales force. If they didn’t think it was good, that wouldn’t be happening, and we wouldn’t be getting the growth we’ve been getting.
NEXT: VCE Compensation
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