LAS VEGAS – Storage giant EMC is handing more of its enterprise services over to its channel partners, the company announced at its first-ever Global Partner Summit here.

Previously the domain of EMC’s own professional services staff only, a collection of EMC’s services offerings will be made available to its channel partners. Those services include “complementary” offerings to most partners’ products and solutions business, said Howard Elias, president and COO of EMC information infrastructure and cloud services.

Services will be available in a variety of models – delivered by partners, by EMC through partners, or by partners with an EMC “backstop” or certain portions handled by the company’s own services team.

The gist of the program is that partners have “the right of first refusal” for EMC services on the EMC gear they sell to customers, Elias said.

“It is our intent to have a roadmap that fulfills the needs of all of our partners for anything they want to react to with their customers,” Elias said. “Just around EMC technology alone, there are $94 billion in services done, and we deliver directly or with partners less than $4 billion of that. So there’s plenty more opportunity for us to go after together.”

The company is also flexible on how partners deliver those services and under whose brands – Elias said EMC is open to working with partners on a white label basis, a co-branded basis, or under the EMC brand. Early offerings available as EMC Cooperative services will include blended  shoring for virtual remote services, health checks and remote services capabilities, and assessment services. Over time, Elias said, the company plans to broaden its offering to include a wide array of other services.

Cooperative Services will start with a few partners, Elias suggested, allowing EMC to learn what it’s doing as it does it. From there, he suggested the company would aim to “learn, react, improve, scale and build from there.”

“The vision is to make it available to any and all partners,” Elias said.

While Elias acknowledges that even today, EMC’s services business does just a fraction of the services delivered around EMC hardware ($4 billion of $94 billion, as mentioned above), he said the company wasn’t setting any hard or fast goals in terms of the balance of servers between partners and the company itself.

“We’ll let the water find its own level,” he said, while reiterating that EMC will always continue to do services, both as a way to support its partners and as a way for it to learn the ins and outs of its own products in customer environments.