EMC's portfolio covers just about everything in storage except a homegrown tape offering. At roughly $15B in revenue, it's one of the largest infrastructure providers on the planet, and customers should become increasingly aware of the many touch points EMC has within its organizations. Storage operations, planning, applications, network ops, security, finance, legal, and procurement all play important roles integrating EMC products and services. Moreover, often purchases are made by line of business, storage type (e.g. big versus small), or technology (content management versus core storage), etc. As well, with EMC's never-ending acquisition strategy, its push into online services and a very broad ecosystem, this matrix will only become more complicated and users should make concerted efforts to simplify the picture or at least understand it.
EMC's diversity heightens the need for organizations to take a holistic view of their EMC relationship in order to maximize returns on their EMC investment. At the very least, customers should be able to answer the following questions:
- How much do we spend, at what times during the year and where geographically (what currency)?
- Where and when do we get the best terms and how can we leverage those across our organization?
- Who in our organization has visited EMC, when, what did they learn, and is the information gathered consistent?
- Where are our relationships strongest, and where do they need improvements?
- What activities (including 'freebies') are we leveraging for training, integration, services, etc., and how can we share that knowledge across our organization?
- What are the top three things our organization should lobby EMC to do to improve our relationship?
By approaching an EMC relationship with an 'account planning' mentality, acting as coherently as the EMC sales and service organizations, customers can establish clear objectives, roles, negotiation strategies, and parameters that will yield measurable results. Managing this initiative like a project with a champion, timelines, metrics, and incentives is critical to results. Multiple sub-teams should be organized (e.g. one focused on core hardware, one on software licensing, and one on maintenance/enhancement services). Given the high switching costs between platform products, ensuring attractive forward-pricing, and maintenance contracts are at least as important as agreements on terms of acquisition.
Action Item: Action Item: Plan to interact with EMC the same way EMC creates account plans. Gather information, identify areas needing improvement, leverage strong relationships, develop a strategy, set measurable goals, and track results. The upside will be a more productive partnership with terms that are aligned to business priorities.
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