With the Duo Shaking the Muscles, it is only partners to gain. SME Channels caught up with Srihari Palangala, Director & Head of Marketing, EMC, to gain more insights of the corporate strategy. An excerpt…
What is in store from EMC for 2016?
A whole bunch of things are lined up for 2016. For example, a lot of products announcements are scheduled to happen and completion of Dell and EMC merger is scheduled to happen. So 2016 is a very exciting year for us not only for the global operations and India operations too. Obviously, we’ve already seen so many things on the radar, but there are many things, which will come out during the course of the year.
Will there be any significant change in terms of the India market, or the channel strategy with this merger?
There are enterprise customers which are named accounts for us, where EMC has special focus. Outside of the named accounts, there is a whole lot of large space, where traditionally most technology companies are looking to increasing their pie, so also EMC is. That is where the channel or partner ecosystem has a role to play. If you flip it from the channel perspective, not only they have a role to play in the whole large white space but also in the enterprise space. We have the ability to keep our partners really close to us, in terms of enabling them to resonate our message to the customers or bring out new logo and offerings to the customers, etc., which is very critical and important. We are embarking on a journey of marketing to them and also marketing with them.
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“So our side of ecosystem is up for the big task of larger engagements. From Dell perspective, they are not new either.”
Srihari Palangala
Director & Head of Marketing
EMC
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The mid-market is such a large play that we have to rely on our partners to tap into the growth engine to get new logos and enter newer segments. We will expand the entire engine with more fit on street to enable the partners.
The other thing that we will be focusing from the strategic perspective where there is opportunity from the mid- market perspective is really two dimensions. We are looking to expand our geo-outreach, as in what can we do for tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Secondly, we have come up with newer products around flash and hyper-converged infrastructure. So when we take these new products to the market, we want to have that marketing tool with the partners, so that they understand our message really well and also carry it on our behalf to the end users.
What will be the impact on the EMC partners from this Merger, probably for Dell partners it will not be a surprise as they used to deal with EMC products?
It is obviously hard to read exactly how that alignment will pan out but from the macro-picture perspective, we are offering high end enterprise engagement and that is what is our sweet spot now. Our ability to engage with enterprise accounts, have that level of service and quality, and have that level of response, and guarantee on our product. So our side of ecosystem is up for the big task of larger engagements. From Dell perspective, they are not new either. From my sense, Dell is more comfortable in that sort of an ecosystem in terms of much more products foot print, more volume for them also. So, now if you look at how we engage with partners, it is about deep focus on the customers.
What is the timeline you have set for this transition in India?
To be honest, I don’t have any more information to share but what we are thinking as it is in the public domain that May to October is the time frame of our transition.
For 2016, which are the areas you have pin pointed in terms of your marketing activities or communication activities?
Looking at it from the marketing strategy perspective, two levels have opened. The entire theme is around the named enterprise accounts. We have our focus on not only deepening our relationship and deepening our engagement with them but also to offer new products and innovations to them. The market is moving, and from the broader wide space perspective; we hope to build our family of partners. And that would be focusing across both new enterprises, and newer products. We ensure that our partners have a healthy pipeline of growth and products to consume. When you look at three things profitability, pipeline and performance; for profitability, the geography is extremely healthy, and we make sure that the partners put up good efforts on the products’ side. From the pipeline perspective, from a whole wide market and from our channel outreach perspective, we want to ensure that the partners are not just prepared for today but they have a healthy pipeline to work on for next quarter. We will ensure that the partners have to drive a very healthy percentage of margins. Talking about performance, we want to ensure that we have regular promotions and rebates, which is extremely healthy. We have MDF for them to drive their business for healthy pipe line of growth.
