EMC’s strategy of expanding its business and adding complimentary solution and services areas to its lineup is paying off, as the company’s Canadian chief says the average size of transactions coming through EMC partners has jumped by 50 percent year-over-year.

Long recognized as a storage giant, one of the major themes of this year’s EMC Forum, held at Toronto’s Allstream Centre this week, was the expansion of the company’s business to include a number of technologies around that core areas of expertise – including storage-related services like backup and recovery, analytics around Big Data projects, and other related services. That approach appears to be working, as Michael Sharun, country manager for EMC Canada, has led to increase in partner attach that has helped to power that 50 percent jump.

“If you look at what we’re doing with [partners], before they’d go out there and to 200 TB as a storage refresh. Now, we’re looking at the business reasons behind that storage, and we’re providing integrated backup with Avamar, Data Domain, and adding business continuity with VPLEX, which is developed in Canada,” Sharun said. “We can just handle a lot more than we could in the past.”

And there are still opportunities to attach more and add more complete solutions around the company’s storage infrastructure, he suggested. While every year for the last half-decade has been proclaimed the year of the virtual desktop, Sharun pointed to VDI as one technology that’s about ready to hit primetime in the Canadian market. Another area worth of increased partner attention is the Big Data market. It’s interesting to the channel because with an analytics-as-a-service type of offering, even smaller Canadian companies can glean the same kind of information from their business and processes that multinational use to shape their direction.

“Doing more with Big Data is primary focus area, and partners are a prime avenue for us to make that happen,” Sharun said.

But to really realize that goal, there are a number of different areas of expertise and focus that have to come together, and it may prove too much for many Canadian partners to bring together under one roof. Technology chops are still key, as such an offering would inevitably be offered in a cloud type of environment. But it’s not just about the technology – there’s a lot such a partner to do around analytics, around risk management, and around pure business consulting.

“There’s going to be a lot of collaboration amongst smaller partners out there to provide the right expertise,” Sharun suggested.

Such an effort would play well in the Canadian midmarket, Sharun said, with partners able to offer packages around ideas like security analytics, sales intelligence from social media, and even vertical-specific analytics opportunities, such as analyzing what’s working and what’s not on a restaurant menu.

“These aren’t applications that require billions of rows, but they help you make real business decisions,” Sharun said.