United Front: EMC To Give VARs Solutions Edge

The storage giant also will take the opportunity to attack rival Veritas Software with a competitive upgrade program.

David Milam, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at EMC, Hopkinton, Mass., said the company plans to unite offerings from its Legato, Documentum and Dantz acquisitions into new offerings that allow partners to sell solutions, not just products. Partners "know their markets extremely well," Milam said. "Now they can offer [multiple products] under new programs that can be sold together, giving them more opportunities."

Solution providers can expect new EMC solution sets with technology from the three acquisitions for storage resource management, e-mail management, availability and business continuity, application management, archiving of data movement, fixed content management and recovery management, Milam said.

One solution provider noted that a local EMC sales rep said EMC plans to unify the reseller contracts from the different acquired companies into a single "Big Brother" contract that will make it easier for channel partners that get the right certifications to sell the various products.

"This is big news," the solution provider said. "It enables EMC to lean more on those who just sell Legato or Documentum or EMC. It will show them they can sell the other parts."

Joe Cunningham, general manager of Computer Professionals International, an Albany, N.Y.-based solution provider, said EMC's efforts to integrate recent acquisitions should help partners.

"EMC has acquired a lot of software in the last couple years, and there's probably a lot of technology in there that most people are not aware of," Cunningham said. "If they can pull it together, it might help us as a reseller. There are still too many silos from the different companies they acquired."

Milam also said that EMC plans to work with partners to strike hard against Mountain View, Calif.-based Veritas in the wake of what he called "confusion" surrounding Symantec's pending acquisition of the software vendor. "We will be aggressive in how we go after the Veritas installed base," Milam said. "We will also leverage partners in a complete competitive replacement program."

Solution providers that work with EMC and Veritas said such an aggressive posture may be tough to pull off. Also at the conference, distributor Arrow Electronics plans to announce that it will add EMC's Documentum ApplicationXtender, which provides archiving of electronic documents and files, to its software portfolio.