“We have reorganized internally as unified channel organization”

Praveen Sahai, VP, Chanels, EMC India and Saarc
Two months back, EMCappointed Praveen Sahai as its VP of channels for India and Saarc region. In this role, Praveen is responsible for growing and driving EMC's partner strategy in the region. He is also spearheading EMC's distribution and systems integrators strategy, deepening current partnerships and creating new ones to increase the company's footprint in the market. An EMC veteran, Praveen is busy on the move meeting channel partners across the country. In between these meetings, he took time for an exclusive chat with DQ Channels....
EMC claims 2012 is going to be its year of channel. From a company which has been enterprise-driven largely till now, what is the rationale driving this shift in focus and what are going to be the guiding principles?
Year 2012 is the Year of Channel for EMC globally. Right from educating customers about the benefits of cloud computing and virtualized storage, to deploying EMC storage products and implementing architecture and design solutions, the role of the channel is central to our success. With the need for managing information increasing, what is required is the right product portfolio to manage growth, reduce cost and improve efficiencies in IT infrastructure. The channel is critical in several aspects for EMC as they are customer-facing.
The channel has worked as a prime growth engine for our go-to-market strategy and has helped shaping up EMC's objectives. One of the focus areas is to make it easier for our partners to do business with EMC. We have reorganized internally as unified channel organization so that channels can access our portfolio including EMC VNX, Data Domain and Isilon portfolio. Channel partners are one of the key pillars of our Go-to-market strategy in India and we have over 200 partners in India spread across over 40 cities.
Unless the EMC proposition is mutually beneficial to both the company and the partners, this would not work and for that to happen partner enablement is critical. In light of these guiding principles, how is EMC going ahead in enabling the channel partners?
EMC understands that it isessential to enable partnersso that they are skilled enough to gauge the market and decide how to sell and where to sell. Every quarter we conduct partner enablement programs in various cities, to get partner sales force accredited and certified. What we really look at doing is to simplify our cutting edge technologies into products which can be easily sold by our partners.
Apart from the product portfolio enhancement, we are also focusing on partner enablement. In line with this, we are adding a unique EMC staff force called Partner Technical Consultants (PTCs) to mentor the partners to have the right skillset, the right learning curve about the industry scenario and product information. PTCs also play a critical role in creating a pool of specialized partners to give the best solution set to their customers.
To make it easier for the partners to sell, implement and support EMC products we have also started implementing a new deal registration process which ensures partner protection for registered deal opportunities via incremental discounts. Also, it provides incremental discount support in winning new accounts with EMC and significantly improves speed of DR process through internal process improvement.
EMC is also helping partners in lead generation by sustained channel marketing support.EMC invests on building skills for our partnersthrough education, demand generation activities and strengthening our technical support to them, besides improving incentives. Customers no longer are looking for box pushers, what they want are the solution providers. The company is training and enabling its channel partners to position them as an end to end solutions provider rather than just the box pushers. The Velocity program works completely on these principles.
The EMC Velocity Program is quite successful. How has the program evolved since you are banking so much on it?Can you elaborate on the various facets of this EMC Velocity program?
TheEMC Velocity Partner Program is designed to make the channel's partnership with EMC as productive and profitable as possible.It provides all the tools, training, support and resources to increase channel profitability and advancement in partner business. The program offers incentives that rewards their loyalty as they continue to invest in EMC's relationship. One of the objectives of this program is to encourage partners to do marketing at their level for their customers to improve their competitiveness in the market and customer retention. We also have separate portals for our channel partners. The portals provide an excellent platform for communication between EMC and its partners.
EMC's Velocity Solution Provider Programprovides even greater opportunities for partner profitability.New Velocity Specialties collectively help partners to enhance core expertise, offer differentiated value-added services and become trusted advisors to the private cloud. Integration of EMC Data Domain and Isilon into Velocity provides easy access to EMC's industry leading end-to-end portfolio of information infrastructure solutions.
EMC Velocity Solution Provider Practice is anew branded designation within the Velocity Solution Provider Program that recognizes advanced levels of capability. Achievement of a Velocity Practice signifies a partner's value in delivering leading-edge solutions. It recognizes high-value skills in pre-sales, sales and services, across a broad set of technology solutions needed to address customers' strategic business initiatives.
Last but not the least, the Cloud Builder Practiceenables partners to successfully design, build and manage cloud infrastructures based on EMC technology.The Cloud Provider Practiceenables Velocity Solution Provider partners with advanced capabilities to design, build and operate their own branded IT-as-a-Service cloud offerings based on EMC technology.

How important is the channel's role in accelerating the adoption of private clouds?How can partners take advantage of your cloud programs designated for the channel ecosystem?

Partners who earn the Velocity Cloud Builder or Cloud Provider Practice designations are eligible for benefits that elevate their value and differentiation in the market and increase profitability. These include branded capabilities to address the rapidly growing private and public cloud markets, deepen their value as a trusted advisor and deliver a richer, more comprehensive set of solutions. Purpose-built products such as VMAX SP and VSPEX would help them lower risk and speed time to deployment while improving quality of service. They would also gain expertise through certification in a comprehensive "open" cloud training program: EMC Proven Professional Cloud Architect.

In addition, they get access to new EMC cloud solutions and services such as Storage-as-a-Service, Backup-as-a-Service, Rapid Launch, Cloud Advisory, Field Enablement and Remote Monitoring, to create new business opportunities. EMC Cooperative Services would also extend partners' cloud solution portfolios by adding health-check and assessment services for virtual infrastructure. Furthermore, they would have exclusive access to best practices and knowledge-sharing through participation in the EMC Cloud Builder VSpecialist online community and marketing support through publication in the EMC Powered Services Catalog, as well as Cloud Practice-specific demand generation and branding programs.

Since EMC is shifting focus from being primarily enterprise-driven to more channel-focused, how are you bringing solutions like VNXe and VSPEX into the channel fold so that partners can benefit from them?

By including the EMC VSPEX, DD160 and VNXe in our ‘partner only' portfolio, we are working with our partner community to open up new market opportunities. The VNXe series is one of the simplest unified storage systems, providing application-optimized management and single-click help and support.The channel-optimized VNXe systems are designed to meet the needs of SMB customers including their preferences for purchasing and deploying new storage technology. Easy training modules gets partners up and running in under three hours, making the VNXe accessible to partners of any size, specifically those focused on volume sales.We also claim that the new channel-only VNXe3150 optimized for organizations building virtualized, private cloud environments , offers 50% more performance and capacity per rack unit.

Next, we announced the EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure in April 2012. With VSPEX, we are giving channel partners the tools to address the fast growing market in virtual infrastructure and private cloud computing. VSPEX has changed how solutions are delivered with partners- a simple, efficient, and flexible reference architecture comprised of EMC storage systems and backup products, along with best-of-breed virtualization, server, and network technology from EMC alliance partners including Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Intel, Microsoft, and VMware. The fourteen initial VSPEX configurations represent the most popular use cases for customers moving to cloud computing. These use cases are focused on enabling customers to accelerate deployment of private cloud and end user computing environments.

VSPEX allows partners the option to mix and match server and network components based on customers' specific infrastructure and application requirements to improve profitability while optimizing the value delivered to the customer. It offers channel partners complete configuration and sizing guidelines for the most common workloads that can reduce the requirements collection phase of the sales cycle.

We are also enabling our channel partners with training and technical and sales collateral to help the partner quickly bring VSPEX to market. The broad awareness, integration into EMC campaigns and demand generation tools helps partners to generate leads for their VSPEX solutions.VSPEX also allows partners to brand their VSPEX solution and increase their mindshare in the customer's environment.Partners can even leverage EMC's investment in the new VSPEX Labs to test additional infrastructures in collaboration with EMC and other VSPEX partners.