Partner Exchange 2011 – Day 2

My second day at Partner Exchange started in the EMC Bootcamp session.  There were many cool topics covered, a couple of which were “turn off the cameras” cool.  One of EMC’s long term goals is to reduce both price and complexity of their products.  This has manifested in the creation of Unisphere and the VNXe line.  The approach they are taking to target the smaller array market, which has traditionally not been a strong market for EMC, is to prioritize simplicity and cost.  On the other hand, the higher end arrays are focused on providing performance and availability.  Seems like a great approach, so I expect to see EMC make a good run at the SMB market.

Another cool offering EMC will be providing to partners soon will be a cloud based demo lab with self service provisioning.  This is a really cool offer from EMC and will make the lives of us partners a lot nicer.

In the afternoon, I attended the first ever Partner Support Day, put on by the Global Support Services team.  It was a very interesting look into VMware’s support organization along with a lot of good troubleshooting information and best practices.  Did you know VMware has 650 people in their support organization and they answer over 300,000 questions every year?  They are distributed across the globe in Palo Alto, California; Burlington, Canada; Broomfield, Colorado; Cork, Ireland; Bangalore, India; and Tokyo, Japan and operate as a “follow the sun” call center.  The troubleshooting, best practices and storage settings deep dive are way beyond the scope of this post.

The evening was spent doing what I enjoy most at Partner Exchange, hanging out with other partners and sharing stories and strategies.  This included dinner and a little shopping at Downtown Disney and the PEX tweet-up.

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