The key advantages to EMC's VSPEX is that it’s simple, efficient and flexible, says Kahn.
The VSPEX approach is unique and innovative, according to Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at Enterprise Strategies Group.
“It’s kind of impossible not to like,” he says. “The two spectrums today are that the customer has to be a scientist and build all this stuff themselves or they have to go to a very tightly controlled configuration that doesn’t really allow for any choice.”
What EMC has done with VSPEX is qualified an ecosystem of those various technology partners and created reference configurations of all these various use cases, says Duplessie. In turn, the technology and channel partners are the ones assembling the best-of-breed pieces and configuring them so the customer doesn’t have to experiment.
This approach is also an improvement over the IT system-in-a-box approach of EMC’s VCE Vblock that has fewer configuration options, and isn’t suited for most users.
“If you think about a Vblock, the reference implementation of Vblock is the very top end of the market, maybe 5% of the market is ever going to do that. These reference architectures cover maybe 85% of the market opportunity,” explains Duplessie.
Also unique is EMC’s inclusion of channel partners in the VSPEX rollout to the point of allowing them to rebrand the completed systems with their brand as well as EMC’s. Besides the aforementioned North American based companies Arrow, Avnet, Trend Micro and Tech Data, multiple channel partners abroad are also included in the VSPEX 'Velocity' channel program.
“Quite frankly, it’s superficial but it’s brilliant,” Duplessie says of the channel partner move. “The distributor never gets their name anywhere other than on a piece of paper.”
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