Sometimes the best deals you make are the ones you don’t.
In 2014, the world learned that for nearly a year EMC was engaged in merger discussions with HP. Can you imagine EMC Canada GM Michael Sharun reporting to Lloyd Bryant of HP or the other way around?
Sharun did not have to deal with that in 2014, but he did have to work on several new initiatives such as a seven-year maintenance price program for XtremIO, offering price protection for flash storage solutions, and taking VMax from a premium product to a value product for the channel. And with that, VMax came with a new aggressive pricing strategy – something that EMC has historically been reluctant to do.
Maybe the most significant news for EMC channel partners was the vendor re-architecting its channel program that would include federation companies VMware, RSA, EMC II (Information Infrastructure) and Pivotal.
Let’s not forget EMC’s million dollar flash guarantee. The Hopkinton, Mass.-based vendor will pay $1 million to the first customer of an of an XtremIO all-flash array who can prove the system’s inline data services have switched off or have throttled back to a default state. So far no one has come forward to claim the prize.