Last year at this time I delivered a strong message at our Global Partner Summit (GPS) that partners are mission-critical to EMC. Here we are one year later, back in Vegas, and I’m sharing the stage with Terry Breen, who leads our Service Provider and Global Alliance partner programs. This year, it’s all about EMC’s power and how we are helping partners harness it.
To bring this point front and center, we announced this morning that effective Jan. 1, 2014 we will retire the “Velocity” name that’s connected to many of our partner programs and introduce one EMC-centric brand that ALL partners – Velocity Solution Provider, Service Provider, Global Alliances, Services, IIG and Technology Partners – will use in going to market with their customers: EMC Business Partner.
Yes, it’s simple. But that’s our goal. When a partner is presented as an EMC Business Partner, the customer will know the company has all of the vision and strength of EMC backing it up. We’ve built incredible equity in the EMC brand over the years, and we want to help partners profit from that association.
This year we have a superheroes theme for GPS and EMC World. So it’s fitting that we talk about how partners can become superheroes with their customers … if they just harness all of the EMC powers at their disposal. So what are these powers we speak of?
VISION. No one has been at the leading edge of emerging technologies like EMC. Cloud, Big Data, Trusted IT — mega-trends on the cusp of exploding. And we are right there, sizing up the opportunities and investing in the future. We recently announced a new company, Pivotal, to catapult us into the new world and new class of applications, leveraging Big and Fast Data, all with the power of cloud independence., This is much like how VMware accelerated our journey to the cloud.
STRENGTH. EMC is by far the storage market leader with 30% share. Last year, EMC storage systems revenues grew three times faster than the IT industry sector, and we’ve been outpacing industry growth for some time now. We just posted our 14th consecutive quarter of revenue and EPS growth. And we’ve got the world’s best leadership and close to 60,000 world-class employees pulling together to move the industry forward.
ACTION. This is where we put the powers of vision and strength to work for partners. By aligning our partner programs with EMC’s three-pillared strategy — and designing the programs to be simpler, more predictable and more profitable — we are transferring a significant amount of EMC’s heft and clout to partners. Our branding of partners as EMC Business Partners is just the start! Stay tuned for more over the coming months.
Those of you reading this at GPS – I’d love to hear your thoughts on what Terry and I had to say, as well as Joe Tucci and the other EMC executives this morning. I’ll be checking for your comments below!
