If you’ve been following my private cloud discussions over the last few years, you’ll probably recall there were two halves to the strategic proposition.
The first part came quickly: strong interest from enterprise IT organizations that wanted to transform their traditional physical IT environment into a private cloud – usually motivated by a strong desire for efficiency and agility. That theme is well underway -- it's everywhere now.
The second part was the promise of a wide selection of compatible service providers, using essentially the same technology infrastructure, that would give enterprises the ability to be choosy: not only in which workloads they wanted to move externally, but in choosing who they wanted to work with at any given time.
Today, a big announcement out of EMC World to accelerate that all-important second half of the strategic proposition: EMC is announcing a formal program for Service Providers to accelerate this important trend.
What Service Providers Want
If you see yourself primarily as a vendor of specific technologies, it’s easy to fall into the trap of simply assuming that all service providers want is access to technology. That's predictable and understandable.
However, if you see yourself as transforming the industry, your mandate goes farther – you need to invest in helping your SP partners grow their business.
That’s the motivation of this new program – coordinating all of EMC’s resources and capabilities to help our service provider partners find and grow new markets. Yes, there’s a lot of technology behind that, but there’s more – business planning, joint marketing and joint solution development.
What Enterprise Customers Want
Any time I speak to an enterprise IT group, what they really want is service providers that can understand and address their needs. My experience over the last few years makes me believe that – yes – we can be of great value to service providers who share this same goal.
My thought is simple: through EMC’s investment in helping service providers understand the needs and wants of our enterprise IT customers, these same customers will find ever more attractive SP-based options to consider going forward. And, in this world, more choice is always a good thing. I’ve already seen evidence of this effect in play; we’ll see more in the future.
Moving The Industry Forward
For EMC, the cloud is really about evolving the industry, and less about specific technologies.
On one side, consider the massive and sustained investment in helping our customers evolve their internal IT environments: VCE and Vblocks, Ionix UIM, RSA security, advanced storage technologies, consulting services, and much more.
On the other side, the beginning of massive and sustained investment to create a marketplace of attractive, enterprise-oriented IT service providers that give our customers more choices than they had before.
Taken together, it’s a compelling story …
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