Channel Partners: EMC Partner: Dell, EMC ‘Complement Each Other’

Originally published by Channel Partners.

An EMC partner says it’s already reaping the benefits of Dell’s pending $67 billion acquisition of the storage company.

Chris Bross, CTO of data-recovery provider DriveSavers, said the consolidation will allow solution providers affiliated with Dell and EMC to become a one-stop shop.

DriveSavers’ Chris Bross: “From the perspective of the channel, their two portfolios of products complement each other,” he said.

For Bross, the acquisition brings together not just Dell and EMC, but companies such as virtualization giant VMware (acquired by EMC in 2007) and RSA Security (acquired by EMC in 2006).

And the results are already here, he said. Monday morning, DriveSavers was facing a server-down issue, and the client was running Dell servers, EMC storage and VMware software, Bross said.

“When there is a collaboration between those companies, it really facilitates providing a solution to the end-user or the customer or in this case, the company, who’s down,” he said.

Bross said the merger is good for service providers and data-recovery providers in particular, as it’s common for clients to have multi-vendor hardware and software in play.

“Because of this collaboration and because there’s such a large proliferation of both Dell servers and EMC storage out there already, being able to serve all three of these companies together under one framework of support is really going to allow at least what we do as service providers to provide a much higher level of integrated support to them all,” he said.

An Oct. 13 survey by 451 Research asked members of its Global Digital Infrastructure Alliance about what they thought of the acquisition plans. Out of the 510 respondents, 31 percent had a positive impression, 20 percent had a negative impression and 49 percent were neutral.

The numbers showed differences from customers that only bought from EMC and customers that only bought from Dell. For EMC-only customers, 20 percent of viewed the acquisition positively, while 41 percent of them saw it negatively. In contrast, 40 percent of Dell-only customers saw the deal positively, with 4 percent calling it negative.

451 Research Analyst Dan Harrington said in the report that Dell customers are more likely to see the acquisition as positive. He cited the “storage-centric” nature of EMC.

“Dell customers believe they will benefit from a broader array of products from a single vendor,” he said in the report. “This lends itself well to current IT buying patterns, which favor converged and integrated offerings from a smaller number of vendors.”

But Bross said the acquisition is going to help with storage, particularly with security. He said data security should be the priority as the industry moves toward cloud-based storage.

“Maybe not everyone considers that as a user, but it sure is if you know what’s happening as far as data protection and data breaches go, and the collaboration of these companies together really should bring an enhanced level of security to the data center when you think about it,” he said.

He pointed to Dell’s SecureWorks and EMC’s RSA as data-security resources for partners.

“One can only hope that there’s better control of security, at least across this bridge of large products,” he said. “Because unfortunately, those of us in the industry know that the bad guys are always one step ahead of the good guys, kind of no matter what, and it’s always our job to go back and defend.”

Originally published by Channel Partners