EMC: Dell deal won't mean we have too many partners

Majority of EMC's EMEA business comes through just 10 per cent of its partners

EMC has insisted its acquisition by Dell won't mean that it is left with too many resellers as the duo's channels merge.

Speaking at a press Q&A session at EMC World in Las Vegas, EMC's EMEA channel chief Philippe Fosse (pictured) said that although Dell has significantly more EMEA partners than EMC does, the more important measure is quality, not quantity.

EMC has about 2,200 partners in EMEA. Last November, Dell said it had added 10,000 new partners to its PartnerDirect programme in the last 12 months, representing a big difference in the size of each company's EMEA channel.

Fosse insisted this would not cause a problem, claiming its enterprise roots mean that in realty, it relies on just a few partners.

"Of the 2,200 partners, you have around about 250 who deliver about 70 per cent of our revenue," he said. "This is 10 per cent that do about 70 per cent of the revenue. And this is normal because we are primarily an enterprise company - we come from the enterprise and the mid-market. The reason we have so many partners is because most of [the rest of] the partners we have are focusing their attention on SMEs.

"About Dell: the only thing I can tell you is that they have much more partners [than we do]. There are more. They come from a volume solution play so... therefore they have many, many of them."

EMC and Dell have unveiled some information about the new-look channel, revealing that a new combined partner programme will come into play on 1 February 2017, and claiming there will be a single, unified channel structure.

Fosse added some more details about how the channel structure will look in the combined entity.

"There will be enterprise partners, mid-market partners and SME-type partners," he said. "There will be fewer in the first category, more in the second and by far more in the third category."