It was all about cloud computing for EMC Corp. (Nasdaq: EMC) in 2010 and Michael Sharun, managing director of EMC Canada, has been working hard to ensure EMC’s channel in Canada has the capacity and the resources to capitalize on the cloud opportunity.
EMC has been overhauling its channel program to bring some standardization to a channel community that had become complicated following several significant acquisitions in recent years. The new Velocity partner program brings all EMC partners under the same umbrella.In Canada, while previously partners shared technical consultants with the direct sales team, now EMC has technical consultants dedicated to working with the channel exclusively.
“They work directly with the channel community to provide first-line support,” said Sharun. “We’ve also expanded the number of channel managers across Canada, and now have managers for every district – West, Central and East. We can serve our channel partners better from that perspective, more touch, and more money from EMC to support partners to enable our solutions.”
The new program and new resources are in support of what EMC is calling the next, and biggest, wave of computing: cloud computing and the private cloud. While Canada often lags behind other geographies in technology, Sharun said cloud computing is an exception because CIOs are actively involved in the discussion and are driving adoption.EMC has been busy rolling-out cloud-related offerings, including a new virtual storage system that will allow IT admins to pool and share storage resources across multiple data centre sites. The VPlex appliance, which can move data between EMC and non-EMC platforms comes in two forms: VPlex Local and VPlex Metro.