EMC India wants its solutions partners to grow the company’s software, 
services, security and cloud revenue. Also, in Q12015, it will turn over out the EMC Business Partner Program which will replace the existing Velocity Partner Program and all other channel programs across all EMC companies including VMware.
“One of our goals prior to moving to the new program is to ensure that the partner revenues from the non-hardware business grows. Globally, our hardware and non-hardware revenue is almost 50:50. In India it is still skewed at 70:30 in favor of hardware.” Praveen Sahai, VP, Channels, EMC India & Saarc Said,
To ensure that the revenue from non-hardware increases, EMC has invested in certification and training over the last year. “Currently, we have more than 500 certified professionals across 100 partners; these include 300 sales and pre-sales professionals, 65 architects, and the rest for deployment and implementation.”
In H12014, more than 70 percent of EMC’s services revenue was delivered through channels. Sahai expects this to exceed 80 percent in 2015.
All the 29 EMC Focused Partners have started selling various software products such as Avamar, Documentum, NetWorker, SourceOne and Syncplicity, while 50 percent of the nearly 100 Growth partners have also been enabled to sell software.
According to Sahai, while Pivotal accounted for about 10 percent of the total revenue in Q32014, most business was driven by global SIs. Apart from the global SIs three partners—VDA Infosolutions, Galaxy IT Solutions and NewWave Technologies— have been enabled to provide Pivotal offerings. Sahai expects another dozen partners to be enabled to sell Pivotal over the next 6-9 months.
He said that though Global SIs still drive enterprise business and account for nearly 40 percent of India sales revenue, a few Focused Partners have started cracking enterprise accounts on their own. “Today, Focused partners account for 30 percent of our business. We plan to upgrade some Growth partners so that we have 50 Focused partners by 2015-end.”
EMC recently introduced close-ended distribution model which has paid rich dividends. “We first consolidated distributors from five to two, and aligned each partners exclusively with one of the distributor. Now both Ingram and Redington are assured of volumes, and there is no competition between them which guarantees them margins. Partners can switch distributors if they want to once a year. We have also ensured that there is a specific credit line for each partner,” informed Sahai.
In addition, EMC has launched online co-marketing initiatives. Said Sahai, “We are helping partners maintain an online presence; this includes support for redesigning their websites and getting the right communication content.”
