3P Philosophy – Profitability, Pipeline and Performance

Praveen Sahai
Vice-President, Channels
EMC India & SAARC

For EMC, Channel enablement is the key to success and it would work towards developing best practices and efficient models to create a competent channel workforce. The company wants its channel community to really feel like partners and not a mere medium to sell boxes and drive profitability.

The company intends to leverage the channel exclusivity by nurturing and incentivizing its channel with “channel only” products and solutions and hope to continue that model with more such upgrades. These changes should be able to help partners shape their strategic outlook, in addition to the closure of run-rate business.

Partner's Sentiments across the Country

EMC keeps a sharp focus for all its partners based on a 3P philosophy – Profitability, Pipeline and Performance. It understands that the channel community is the key to build customer confidence.

Praveen Sahai, Vice-President, Channels, EMC India & SAARC, says, “It is also important to help partners shape their strategic outlook, besides meeting short-term goals and quarterly goals. In addition, I would like to make the partners a part of the EMC family and give them the right to do pricing and support service. This will uplift their morale and further empower them to address a much wider customer base.”

Channel Management and Channel Policy

To build a healthy business, both the Vendor and the Channel Partners need the support of each other. A shared respect and a common vision are mutually beneficial. “In the background of the tough economic environment, it is critical to increase the addressable market for partners and build discipline around sales adjacency growth. We would like to introduce new initiatives in the partners’ line of business, and enable them to sweat every dollar invested, as they are trusted advisers to their customers. Our initiatives include the ones on cloud, big data and analytics,” opines Praveen.

Channel Relationship Programme

We are striving to become the most channel-friendly company in the technology sector. We would provide the channel community a broader variety to be a true system integrator and not just a box-pusher. The growing acceptance of Cloud with the advent of Big Data will only lead to a huge opportunity for the channel community. With digital information set to double every two years in the next decade, and the emergence of digital business model, the importance of information infrastructure / storage technologies will only increase in future.

Channel Engagement

In the last one year, EMC has successfully increased addressable market for its partners with back-up / recovery portfolio and new initiatives to create sales adjacencies to help them on the system integration business. In addition, it has initiated a 360-degree engagement where it is working with its partners on several levels – marketing, lead generation, business planning and pre-sales support. With this, the company has managed to create a healthy pipeline of business for our partners, apart from maintaining the momentum of business closures.

EMC has also successfully created adjacent sales opportunities in areas like Cloud, Backup and recovery systems (BRS), Scale-out Storage (Isilon), Big Data and Analytics portfolio, in addition to the vast storage product line it has.