EMC has restructured its Australian team to go after more midmarket opportunities, and hopes Avnet can help by underwriting the cost of enterprise storage so partners can sell it as a service.
At the start of the year, the vendor's former director federal public sector, Brett Harris, was appointed general manager, midmarket, inside sales and distribution.
It's part of a broader attack on medium-sized customers to expand its reach beyond its stronghold in the big end of town. This includes incentives for EMC salespeople to grow business outside the enterprise.
EMC's long-term distributor, Ingram Micro, will play a role here, as will new recruit Avnet, which replaced incumbent distie Westcon after a competitive tender last year.
The 'Powered by Avnet' facility sees the distributor – which turns over US$27.9 billion globally – finance EMC storage equipment, such as Data Domain backup gear, or VCE converged hardware, so the partner can pay by the month, and take it to market on a consumption model without the upfront capital expense.
Shant Soghomonian, EMC senior manager of partner sales, said the 'Powered by Avnet' approach would open up a new channel "outside of the top-tier service provider partners that we have within EMC".
"The next tier of partners down, a lot of the time don't have the balance sheet opportunity to be able to make those capital investments so they can take those managed private cloud or hybrid cloud offerings to market.
"Avnet, with its strong balance sheet, its cash, can make those upfront investments that then allows the wider, broader channel to be able to go out and provide these services to their customers," added Soghomonian.
Joergen Jakobsen, EMC's vice president and GM of channels for the APJ region, sat down with CRN while visiting Sydney for the vendor's local awards. He said Avnet's ability to capitalise hardware for partners could be "very powerful".
Mark Johnston, Avnet Australia & New Zealand director, sales and group services, said: "What we do with Powered by Avnet, we use Avnet's financial strength. This is designed as a midmarket play. We add our capital, we add our services and we add our global brand, which means security.
"Then we have the capability to underwrite the deal, if you like. We'll sign a tripartite agreement where the partner is the prime contractor, but we can write a clause in that says, "If the partner runs into tough times, if there is need to terminate for cause, Avnet will commit to continue the contract through to its termination under the same T's and C's." What it really allows these mid-market partners to do is to bat above their weight."
The distributor positions the 'Powered by Avnet' service as another option alongside its premium private cloud platform, which runs in Fujitsu's North Ryde and Homebush data centres and is built primarily on Lenovo compute with IBM and Tintri storage, as well as Dell gear.
Avnet also offers a public cloud management console, based on the Orbitera platform, which its channel partners can white label with their own company branding. This creates opportunities to help clients monitor consumption across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and more.
Chris Farrow, business manager for cloud services at Avnet, said 'Powered by Avnet' was built for scenarios "where a partner might have a workload or processing for a client that doesn't conveniently fit in either Avnet premium private cloud or it doesn't fit in a public cloud.
"It might fit better on Nutanix, say, or something like that. We'll facilitate turning that into an opex stream. We'll wrap our service desk capability around it, wrap our cloud monitoring capability around it and otherwise help that partner operate that environment in a pay-by-the-month, almost hosted private cloud model," Farrow said.
EMC's hyper-converged play
EMC's Jakobsen said the vendor is also hoping to attract a smaller segment of the market thanks to its entry into the hyper converged space through the new VxRail appliance from its VCE subsidiary.
VxRail sits as the entry-level device underneath VCE's VxRack and Vblock solution. It combines EMC storage, VMware hypervisor and management, plus commodity x86 compute into an appliance that starts at $60,000.
Jakobsen said: "Especially when we get into medium-sized customers that don't have any internal IT infrastructure, they actually don't really want to deploy too many people to manage their IT. That would lead to either 'buy it' – which is why hyperconvergence is easier for them than to try and buy multiple discrete products and put them all together and make sure that they are up-to-date – or they like to buy it on a cloud model because they don't want to invest out of their own pockets into an IT structure.
"Having the capability like what Avnet is putting up for those midmarket customers and through partners that might not individually have the same scale – and leverage the scale of Avnet – I think it's going to be very powerful."
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