I’ve been spending a good deal of time recently speaking with partners. The conversations typically focus around three things:
1) How is business now and what will drive or obstruct your success in Q4?
2) What are the plans to grow business in 2012?
3) How can EMC help?
The individual conversations vary but the central themes that emerge are interesting and often predictable:
- “Business is OK but could be better. “
- “Competition is tough and getting tougher.”
- “Product margins are tight so we're investing in services and will be hiring more technical resources in 2012”
- “We're still figuring out our own cloud play and would welcome any help you can provide.”
- “We need more accessible, easier and quicker to consume education and training.”
More reseller partners are becoming cloud solution providers and are seeking to grow that business.
More partners are crossing borders – often through acquisition. Canada to the US. US to EMEA. Mexico to Latin America.
More partners are selling Vblock, or implementing Vblock based services for Hybrid cloud, including on-demand services to customers that used to just buy their own IT gear.
As EMC has encouraged more partners to sell enterprise products such as VMAXe and VPLEX, they’ve been getting their teams trained and ready from both sales and technical perspectives. And as we follow through, we see more partners firmly committed to growing their profitable EMC relationship.
Sometimes that means starting with a core group and then bringing others up to speed as they see opportunities multiply.
Nearly all are looking to enhance Symmetrix expertise and quite a few have VPLEX in their demo labs.
In some cases, by virtue of recent acquisition or mergers, a big part of their attention is centered on building staff expertise and focus. That may mean less business in the fourth quarter but higher expectations going into 2012.
Getting back to, “How can we help?” EMC is responding and reexamining all the ways we work with partners. That includes variations on these themes in particular:
- Need help to focus on the right positioning questions to ask... & the right follow-up to steer customers into the best possible path forward. Cloud isn’t for everyone.
- Need the high-level EMC messages to circulate broadly and the more particular to get each partner region standing on their own – especially in the enterprise space.
- Need to have technical exchange opportunities with EMC. Things like the ESD Partner Champions program and on-line communities.
- Need more real-world examples, success stories of where we have seen strategies work.
- Need to better understand the logic flow that reaches the best, profitable, solution proposal.
- Need help with strong positioning and competitive understanding.
- Need help in developing cloud service offerings.
- May need some occasional handholding but the objective is to be independent 90% of the time. That’s how partners will profit most.
- EMC needs to understand and support partner business objectives and look for ways to mesh with EMC’s own.
“Nobody buys cloud.” Not all at once anyway. So partners want to know how to help their customers move down the path that is best for their needs - one that will still result in profitable business and satisfied customers.
Practical.
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