VCE, now under greater control from EMC after Cisco reduced its interest, is still very much a high end enterprise operation, says Jan Lawford, Senior Director, Global Strategic Accounts and EMEA Channels, VCE. It has been working with big resellers and integrators across Europe, and will use the EMC connection with distribution to expand.
VCE currently has around 80 partners in Europe who are active, but is having conversations with at least 200 in total who have the required enterprise focus. It claims to have over half the converged business marketshare, and still being a hypergrowth business.
“It is a matter of education on converged solutions,” she says, “ not a product sale,” and so requires a certain high level engagement on business issues with customers. An indicator of just how high-level this is, and the scale of deal size, is the recommendation that customers use an embedded VCE expert, a Resident, for the first three months to a year. “We find that this encouraged the rate of adoption, and that those with the Resident, will buy more units faster.”
On the EMC connection, she says that while VCE will continue to have its own partner prorgamme, it makes sense to use the EMC element, particularly in distribution, to recruit the right sort of partner. VCE itself has a very small team in Europe, and is focused on building skills and investing in key partners, some of whom have experienced 100% growth rates year on year.