Slashdot Mirror


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."

10 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Business CAN play nice by msobkow · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Business CAN play nice by redmid17 · · Score: 2

      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.

      If you continue this line of thinking, you're just asking to be sued

    2. Re:Business CAN play nice by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 2

      Actually, this happens all the time. I don't know how this made it past the media filters. "Businesses end relationship" is not news. I suppose this is a vestige of Slashdot being an industry news site, instead of the political point of view site it seems to have become.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    3. Re:Business CAN play nice by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Most of them do. It is boring and doesn't make the news.
      We think the world is going down in a ball of flame because how horrible everything seems. But in reality news doesn't cover the good news, it is boring. They cover the exciting bad new where there is conflict and risk.
      The news about a law that passes with bipartisan support gets a paragraph on NPR with a senator doing a quick 10 second speech saying, this should show that we can work together on a common goal....

      But news about laws that are in gridlock going down the line where it is split and both sides need to stand up to each other... Now that is news.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  2. Old news by zyzko · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Old news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      I don't think the "divorce" has anything at all to do with Equallogic, as Equallogic is not really an EMC competitor. The divorce has much more to do with Dell's acquisition of Compellent and also Exanet and Ocarina. These three acquisitions put Dell in a position to make a very big splash in the enterprise storage market. A Compellent SAN with Ocarina compression and dedupe and an Exanet NAS head will be a mighty, mighty storage device.

    2. Re:Old news by unencode200x · · Score: 2

      Dell also bought Compellent (iSCSI, FC, etc.) and has their own MD series (DAS, iSCSI, FC). EqualLogic has it's own niche, but I'm not fond of that brand yet) as it's expensive to scale, but I'm sure makes sense in some cases.

      With EMC introducing VNX they're directly competing with each other in many spaces.

      We have several of the products I mentioned and they've perform very well.

      Full disclosure: The place I work for is an EMC and Dell (and HP and NetApp) partner/reseller/integrator...

      --

      Chance favors the prepared mind.
      Perfect is the enemy of good.
  3. Re:So this is why... by billcopc · · Score: 2

    I fielded one such call years ago. I calmly replied that their mid-range products cost more than my employer's annual gross, and never heard from them again.

    Sure, those fancy multi-tiered EMC boxes do a lot more than my ghetto Linux file servers, but if they cost about 5 years of salary just to acquire, well I can afford to lose up to 5 years of work on my ghetto box before the EMC becomes cost-effective. Especially now that high-end boards come with one or two 40GBE ports built-in, I can deploy some scary fast SAN space on the cheap - relatively speaking of course. Now if only the switches could drop a zero from the price...

    --
    -Billco, Fnarg.com
  4. When to buy from Dell VS EMC by zerofoo · · Score: 2

    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

  5. Commercial Storage. by jellomizer · · Score: 2

    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.