Virtustream will form the basis of EMC’s managed cloud services business, and will be sold both direct and through service provider and integrator partners.
Former Brocade executive Mihir H. Shah tells ChannelBuzz why he thinks Drobo remains a valuable commodity in a world of ever more complex storage solutions, what he sees as new opportunities for the company, and his view of how it will go to market going forward.
While building a strong SMB-focused channel to sell hyperconverged is more challenging than a channel selling to larger customers, Scale is counting on the simplicity of its solution to even the odds for its partners, who are the company’s entire sales force.
Notable changes include funding a dedicated resource for Platinum partners, enhancing the Demo program with six months of free support and the ability to resell Demo units, and a fourfold increase in MDF funds.
The new cloud-only solution is targeted at customers who don’t want the expense or trouble or deploying a physical or virtual device locally, and is expected to significantly increase the number of Axcient’s MSP partners.
Stratoscale emerged from stealth late last year with some powerful vendor investors, a unique hyperconverged value proposition and a 100 per cent channel strategy. The plan is for the product to be available this summer.
Michael Murphy, vice-president and country manager of Citrix Canada, reviewed announcements from this year’s Citrix Synergy likely to be of particular interest to Canadian partners and customers.
Hitachi’s Social Innovation strategy is designed to leverage analytics to drive their companies forward, and the new SAP HANA solutions are part of this strategy for HDS.
Dell unveils its new SCv2000 entry class array, the PS 6610, a new dense offering for the PS family along with new PS software, and Dell Storage with Microsoft Storage Spaces, which beefs up Dell’s software-defined portfolio.
EMC is also announcing several other programmatic moves, including a Federation Ready designation and expanding EMC’s EMC Ready sales transformation initiative to partners. Their EMC True loyalty program pilot is now being publicized and expanded globally.
The channel-exclusive VSPEX solutions, which have been targeted at mid-market and SMB customers, are being expanded to the enterprise with the addition of the EMC VMAX 100K enterprise data services platform.
The new program replaces the legacy one Arcserve brought with it from its days as part of CA, and leverages Ingram Micro’s business intelligence capabilities in several respects.
In addition to putting more investment into their alliances strategy and their channel, Veeam is encouraging traditional partners to take advantage of the Veeam Availability Suite’s new cloud capabilities.
Red Hat has built out its storage portfolio over the last year, and now the company’s storage chief says it’s time to take the technology to the channel.
SanDisk has created a second program for its enterprise-focused products, which mainly came from Fusion-io, because their target markets, sales motions, and skill requirements are different from the SMB-focused Premier program.
The changes include increased revenue requirements for all tiers, which break up what had become a top-heavy distribution of partners in a program where advancement was too easy, and permit proper incents of Barracuda’s most valuable partners.