Sonik Porwal
Director,
Channel and Strategic Alliances,
EMC India
“We invest extensively to enable our partners to become consultants to their customers”
What is EMC India’s channel strategy?
Our main emphasis is on quality of partners rather than quantity. We want to work with select partners and guide them to become complete solution providers. Our motto has been to make our partners trusted advisors of our customers. Hence, our focus over the years has been to invest in training these select partners and building capabilities among them to deliver solutions that customers demand.
As you are aware, we work with two distributors in India, namely Redington and Select Technologies. We have a total of 100 authorized partners, which at tier-1 include our global system integrators like Dell and Indian system integrators like Wipro, CMC and HCL. At tier-2 level, we have two types of partner accreditation—Advantage and Premier Partners.
What investments does EMC make to enable a channel partner?
We invest extensively to enable our partners to become consultants to their customers.
EMC is committed to help channels to move up the value chain and play a larger role in the information infrastructure solutions space. Customers look for partners who can guide them, manage and consolidate their infrastructure and address their pain points effectively.
Our Power Link partner portal offers e-learning and online training to partners. We also conduct regular webinars for our partner community. Apart from this, we have created a dedicated team to provide pre-sales and project execution support to partners. We have a large partner management team.
What are the unique features of Power Link portal? How it is attracting the partner community?
The portal provides our partners continuous online access to a wide range of tools and resources to help answer their queries, which they require while clinching deals. The resources help connect directly with worldwide community of EMC experts, engineers and support professionals.
How is EMC’s velocity partner program doing?
Under the Velocity Partner Program, we provide four things to partners namely, training and education, mentoring, incentive program and business review. With this program, we intend to support our partner network in a better way. We provide them with adequate incentives and rebates. EMC rewards its channel partners with rebates on deal registration, goal achievements (yearly, quarterly and solution specific), thereby helping them increase their bottom line. The program is geared towards ensuring that the initial investment by partners is minimal as well as that they will be able to recoup their initial investment in the shortest possible time frame.
Can you elaborate on the new enhanced Velocity Partner Program?
Under the new enhanced Velocity Partner Program, EMC provides training to the channel workforce and develops technological expertise.
We also provide solution-specific training to partners. In addition to this, we also fund them for marketing activities.
EMC has also opened partner support centers. What services are offered through these centers?
Our partner support centers streamline internal systems and processes to make it easier for partners to work with us. This has been highly beneficial for our partners. Partners can avail of enhanced sales support from EMC through these centers.
In terms of market positioning, where does EMC stand in India?
According to some industry estimations, EMC was ranked as the top network storage vendor for the third consecutive year with annual revenue of Rs 334 crore in FY06-07. It is also ranked number one with a market share of 23 percent in the overall external storage market based on FY06-07 performance.
What are the key drivers for EMC’s market share?
Our continued leadership in the enterprise segment has had a great impact on our business growth. Our increased focus on commercial segment has also worked well for us.
In addition to this, we have always stressed on the need for organizations to intelligently store and manage data, virtualise and automate information and create partnerships that deliver on the value promised.
We continue to specialize in areas like content management, data de-duplication, security, virtualization, green IT, storage resource management, internally as well as among partners. This has enabled the partner community to keep themselves abreast of the latest trends.
--------------------------------------- As told to Faiz Askari |