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Dell, EMC Divorce After 10-Year Reseller Relations
Lucas123 writes "An extremely profitable relationship between Dell and EMC has come to an end after 10 years. Over the past five years, as Dell has continued to sell more of its own storage products — going further and further upstream in the market — while EMC has continued to sell more products aimed at lower-end customers. As a result, competition between the two vendors has grown. But, the partnership resulted in big revenue for both companies, with Dell reporting as much as 50% of its storage revenue from EMC rebranded products in some years. 'If anything, Dell is making much more money on the bottom line now. So as far as divorces go, this was a pretty easy one,' said industry analyst Steve Duplessie."
Look at that. A successful and profitable cooperative venture coming to an end, and not a lawsuit in sight.
Now if the rest of the business community could only learn from this and stop with the patent lawsuits and market trolling, and get back to selling great competitive products.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
This was announced to Dell/EMC customers...what, about a year ago if I remember correctly?
Dell has been pushing their (acquired through company merger) Equallogic series of storage servers for long and nobody saw this as an suprise. But I guess the good relations must go on because EMC has VMware and Dell does not definitely want to be known as diy vendor when it comes to VMware.
I keep getting cold calls at my office from EMC. About once a week the same representative calls wanting to know what EMC can do for us. Despite my telling her that she called me the week before and the answer is the same, she then claims she only got the account a few days ago... right. I'd imagine EMC needed Dell more than some people think.
When it's finished, EMC will be suing Dell over technology in the Equallogic series of storage devices.
The partnership helped Dell increased their numbers but customers were always left to sway in the wind. Their sales process was a cluster. Their support for EMC was a cluster. We bought a lot of Dell branded EMC storage. Support came from Dell and their party line was to blame it on EMC but not provide any escalation to EMC engineers who could really help to identify solve problems. Basically all Dell was good for was sending a tech to replace disks that had 'phoned home' that they were failing.
After some major contract negotiations and threats to take all of our Dell desktop, server, and storage business somewhere else (millions a year) they transferred our support contract to EMC so we could get support directly. Considering the amount of time, money, and customer goodwill spent on Dell flubbing this relationship we should have just bought directly from EMC.
When I worked in the finance industry, we bought AX100s from Dell - those were for the less critical systems. We cared less about support and more about cost.
We bought Symmetrix and Clariion products direct from EMC. We did not want to deal with Dell tech support for those very critical systems. We paid through the nose, but EMC's support and training was top-notch.
-ted
Storage is a funny field, it is more expensive then people usually think.
When I got hired my Boss wanted me to research a storage solution, In his mind he was willing to pay $2,000 he didn't tell me that. So I did the research figured out how much we needed called vendors got the information I needed and gave my boss an estimate of $40,000. He wasn't happy with that quote and told me how much they wanted to pay. So I came up with a solution that will fit the price, but then he wasn't happy because it didn't do everything they needed.
Nothing happened.
A year later they hired someone who specializes in storage solutions he did the research and came up with a $50,000 estimate. I told him that they won't like it but he didn't listen to me and the boss was unhappy with the quote they raised their expectation to about $20,000. He trimmed down the solution to be about $30,000 and they weren't happy because it didn't have all the features they wanted.
Nothing happend.
An other year later.
They finally got the storage solution they wanted because they were sick of buying servers just because they needed storage. At this point they Paid $250,000 for the solution, all the bells and whistles. Because they really needed it.
Now the company had been growing during this time so their requirements have grown. But the point is Storage Cost a lot of money, A lot more then we think it should be.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Look at the number of storage technologies DELL has purchased, not the least of which is Compellent . No wonder they are getting divorced. They have a better, cheaper solution that is KILLING EMC whenever they go head to head on price, performance and functionality. Services (allbeit UNGODLY Expensive services) and "partnerships" are the dividing factors. My .02.
I'm surprised it took this long, but I guess this is when the contract expired. Once Dell tried to buy 3Par, it was obvious that they viewed EMC as a short-term partner to get their foot in the storage door, not a long-term partner. Considering the amount of money people pay for storage, I'm not surprised. We went through the same thing when HP dropped EMC back in the late 90s.
(Note: I'm an EMC employee, but I have no involvement with contracts. I did notice that we switched PC brands from Compaq to Dell when the deal was first announced, and we recently switched away from Dell--we don't like buying from competitors, it seems.)