Cisco, EMC Align ‘Three Paths to the Cloud’ Incentives
September 4, 2012
Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.
Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) and EMC (NYSE: EMC) have aligned their channel incentives in their “three paths to the cloud” strategy. The goal? To help partners increase their profitability no matter how they decide to play in the cloud computing space — as cloud services providers, cloud aggregators or cloud integrators.
As part of the announcement made at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco, the two companies unveiled new joint reference architectures and integrated customer support, as well as new offerings to support the VCE Vblock appliance. For customers, it means more flexibility and choice, the companies stated, but for partners, it hopefully means some more ease in providing cloud computing infrastructures and services — and, of course, better margins…
“Now, we’re working together to meet customer demand with Cisco Validated Designs for EMC VSPEX and aligned channel incentives to accelerate VSPEX adoption,” said Rick Snyder, Cisco’s vice president of global and strategic partners, in a prepared statement.
The companies announced two new Cisco Validated Designs (CVD) for EMC VSPEX, one for the SMB space and the other for midmarket customers. They were designed to help customers accelerate their journey to private cloud computing environments using Cisco and EMC VSPEX products for Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Hyper-V and VMware (NYSE: VMW) vSphere 5.0 architectures.
Part of the announcement follows on channel partner program announcements from Cisco made over the last couple of years. That is, the company is simplifying the process of “accruing incentives” and boosting partner profitability. Much of the rest of the announcement is made up of milestones the companies wanted to share, but the real message for partners is in making things simpler and giving a bump to profitability through VCE Vblock and related solutions.
“Many of the customers we work with want to deploy a cloud, but aren’t quite sure how to do so quickly and easily,” said Joe Coxon, business development manager of Cisco/EMC partner Synapse, in a prepared statement.