A new report from EMC and VMware has data on enterprise digital transformation that, except in virtualization, shows customers are far, far short of where they want to be. The sunny side of the story is that many are taking moves to get there.
VxRail has the same concept as last year’s unsuccessful EMC first foray into hyperconverged, but is designed to be much more flexible and modular, and benefits greatly from an improved software stack. It will also be available through all EMC partners, not just ones certified on VCE.
Changes for 2016 include allowing Authorized partners to qualify for the Silver tier at mid-year, increasing the Silver rebate payout, and changing revenue tier thresholds in some markets, which include Canada, but not the U.S.
With major changes on the horizon, Michael Kerr stresses that EMC partners need to be able to articulate the business outcomes of the increasing complex technology available to them.
With the new Avnet Knowledge Network, the distributor is aiming to bring all of its support and training offerings under the same roof.
EMC’s Data Lake 2.0 significantly enhances the original core-focused Data Lake strategy by extending it to the edge and the cloud, as well as strengthening the core. This is also likely to expand partner opportunities somewhat beyond the very limited involvement thought likely when the original Data lake was announced.
While everyone at Dell World this year wants to know all about the upcoming integration with EMC, there are significant limitations on what the company can say at this point. That being said, here’s an interpretation of what they are willing to put on the record.
Dell and EMC execs say the combined company will be an IT powerhouse from the SMB to the largest enterprise.
The Catalyst Alliance will see EMC and Dimension Data team up to make cloud offerings more available to midsize enterprises with quicker deployments.
The new credential provides partners access to deploy the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, part of a push to create channel program alignment amongst Federation members.
EMC’s Canadian channel chief lays out EMC’s value proposition and how partners can best position themselves within it.
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.
The massive pace of technological change is compelling EMC to reassess how it goes to market with its enterprise alliance partners, and while changes to the strategy are very much a work in progress, they are likely to bring significant change to the relationship between the vendor, its alliance partners, and solution providers.
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.
EMC’s announcements indicate that EMC’s open source strategy is becoming much more critical, something the company says is good news for their channel partners.
EMC sees this as a new category of product, which provides the same benefits as hyperconverged appliances provide, but to the datacentre, where the appliances do not scale well.
The rapid rise of mobility, and the user expectations it has created, plus the very real promise of integrated analytics, have changed the universe where solution providers operate, and they need to adjust or lose major opportunities.
Permabit’s deal with Arrow to bring its data efficiency appliance designed to let the older OEMs compete with the new hyperscale vendors makes IBM the third vendor to bring this technology on board, following EMC and NetApp last fall.
The Federation Business Data Lake greatly expands EMC’s converged Big Data offerings, and while only EMC’s more sophisticated partners will likely be able to sell it, it will be available to them.
