The new Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) company, which includes the founding vendor’s original VCE coalition, unveiled two years ago, as well as the Acadia joint venture launched by Cisco and EMC 14 months ago to sell VBlock private cloud building blocks, has a channel-focused sales strategy that will push pre-sales and post-sales support to the channel. But what does this mean for the Middle East channel? When can partners start working with the VCE company?
Although details are still murky at the moment, industry sources say the new VCE Company will launch in the next 45 to 60 days its own channel programme. The new company is also expected to offer a deal-registration programme instead of forcing channel partners to register deals separately with EMC, Cisco and VMware.
Also new for the channel will be specific list prices for the different Vblock configurations, a marked change for partners who were frustrated by the old business model under which all of the different components had to be priced separately by the three vendors, say sources close to the company.
VCE is planning to offer specific rewards that solution providers will receive in addition to the channel programme benefits they get from the individual VCE vendors. Finally, VCE will offer market development funds to help partners with demand generation activities.
It has been long coming and it?s finally here as VMware, Cisco and EMC are re-launching their much hyped private cloud alliance as a new company with an agreement to work more closely with the channel community.
