 Channel Chief
“Our challenge is SMBs buy storage with server”
Viswanath Ramaswamy, Director, Partners & Alliances, EMC India & Saarc, on the company’s growth plans for the year, its SMB strategy, and the biggest challenge it faces today
All of a sudden everyone’s talking about EMC being channel-friendly. What are the reasons for the change?
We were always a channel-friendly company. However, till 2008, most of our products were targeted at the large enterprises where only the large tier-1 players or some of the largest tier-2 partners had a focus. But in the past four quarters or so we have increasingly started offering products that are affordable to even SMB customers. Tier-2 and mid-market channel partners are also trying to grow up the value chain. This prompted us to engage more with mid-market partners.
How many partners are you engaging with currently? What is the growth plan for the year?
Our channel engagement program is known as Velocity Partner program, and we presently engage with around 140 partners in the country. The program itself is split into SMB, Advantage, Premier and Signature partners. Each partner slab is associated with target commitments, and investments in trained and certified manpower. For example, an SMB partner will need to have one pre-sales and one sales professional who are certified.
We plan to scale to about 200 partners by the end of the year. We are looking at both depth and breadth, and have divided the country into 20 clusters in this go-to-market strategy. We are hoping to cover rest of the market, especially B- and C-class cities, using a hub-and-spoke model.
Can you explain the details of your SMB strategy?
Storage is today important to practically all SMB customers. Our first step was to create affordability for our product lines, and present products that are easy for our channel partners to sell. In February we introduced a SAN solution, Clarion AX4, that retailed at about Rs 2.6 lakh. That broke a major price barrier, and now hundreds of SMB customers are able to afford a SAN solution. Similarly, in April, we introduced a special edition of Networker Faststart, our enterprise backup solution. In May we launched an affordable enterprise-class network attached storage called Celera NX4. With the acquisition of Iomega, we today have storage solutions starting as low as Rs 3,000 and going all the way to Rs 3 crore.
Can you throw some light on how EMC is integrating products that have been acquired?
EMC has acquired around 49 companies in past decade, and most of them are today integrated within the company’s various solutions. For example, some of our backup software, the result of the acquisition of Legato, is already completely integrated and is being offered through our partners. Iomega is a recent acquisition, and many of Iomega storage products are today shipping the EMC Lifeline operating system and Retrospect backup software. One of our senior colleagues, Praveen Sahai, has taken charge of the Iomega business. Similarly, RSA India is operating as a separate entity, but is closely working with the parent company. We also have synergies with VMware. Over the next few months we will unveil a more cohesive go-to-market strategy for different EMC companies.
What is the biggest challenge you face today?
We are in a unique position because EMC is perhaps the only company with a complete storage story, whether it’s SAN, NAS, unified storage, consumer disk drives, backup software, security or content management. While we are facing competition in each of these areas, there is no single vendor who competes with us in all these areas. We do not have worries when it comes to either technology or branding in the enterprise space.
However, in the SMB market, both channel partners and customers are presently inclined to buy storage from the server vendor. This is not true in the enterprise space, where CIOs separate the decisions on servers and storage. Since EMC is not a server player, the advantage shifts to server vendors who dabble in storage.
To some extent our relations with Dell helped us because Dell is the biggest reseller for EMC storage worldwide, and has been moving our storage products aligning [them] with Dell servers. We are presently trying to change the mindset of SMB decision-makers as well as our own partners to decouple servers from storage. I must admit that the strategy of the competition to bundle storage and servers has been successful so far, but we intend to educate the SMB market. One message we are driving is that it’s storage and backup that’s a natural combination, not servers and storage. Our story on storage and backup is definitely stronger, and we are educating our partners to drive the message to our end-users.
For many years you were engaging directly with your customers. How are you managing the direct and indirect business?
EMC has perhaps the most comprehensive set of rules of engagement in the industry, with penalties even for our own sales team if they break it. In our rules we clearly mention the direct accounts we handle, and most of them are global accounts. We offer deal registration opportunities for channel partners, and offer partners incentives for bringing in new businesses. |