EMC 'putting money where mouth is' on mid-market
Vendor makes moves to ease tensions among smaller partners
EMC's new channel boss has promised to appoint a team of extra staff dedicated to keeping smaller partners happy as he sets out his channel vision.
Russell Poole (pictured, right) took over the reins as UK and Ireland channel director for EMC in the summer, a role which he carries out on top of his longer-standing duties leading the service provider and public sector businesses.
He took over - from Terry Beale, who left for an EMEA product role - at a rocky time for EMC's channel after news of its incoming Business Partner Programme unsettled some smaller partners. The BPP will enforce eye-wateringly high new revenue requirements when it comes in next year, leaving smaller partners worried they will be cut out of the market.
Poole said although EMC is openly placing bigger bets on fewer, higher-performing partners as part of its UK and global strategy, midmarket and smaller partners will still be looked after.
"I am going to put a whole team of people in place to focus on partners who might sit outside of our top tiers of the partner programme - I am going to invest in specific heads for that," he told CRN at an EMC partner event in London.
"In that sense we will be putting our money where our mouth is. We won't just be talking about it, we're putting money into people who will help those guys become successful.
"There were clearly questions to be answered [when I joined]."
At the moment, EMC's channel team is running at about 50 per cent capacity, with seven of 16 positions currently vacant. Poole said he hopes to fill the roles by the end of the quarter.
"I've inherited what some people would call a problem but what I think is a really good opportunity," he said. "It gives me an opportunity to bring in new talent which I can introduce to the business."
EMC's "new-talent agenda" and focusing on its top-tier partners are two of Poole's key priorities in the new role. The third, he said, was getting more out of EMC's distie partners Avnet, Arrow, Tech Data and Commtech.
"I'm very keen that we have a more joined-up strategy with distribution," he said.
"There are lots of channel partners which are managed through distribution, but in the UK for many years we've only ever had one person in EMC running distribution. I'm going to create a team of people - a business - which centres itself around distribution and works with their channel communities to provide a more joined-up strategy."
He insisted there are no plans in place to trim the number of disties it works with but said he will be expecting more from them.
"Our mission is to work proactively with their reseller channels to improve demand generation, but we expect the distributors to bring back to EMC more productive resellers," he said. "It's a two-way street."