EMC is shaking up its Canadian operations with a new management team and a consolidation of its local operations.
This fall the company will relocate its headquarters to Mississauga, Ont., which will be home to both its sales and customer
service teams. The storage specialist has also created a Canadian country management position and appointed Ross Allen, its former area manager for Telecommunications, Finance and Western Canada to the role. Other changes include the assignment of Dan Orr as director of the Technology Solutions group responsible for services, and Geoff Haydon to director of Commercial Operations, which will pursue small and medium enterprise accounts.
Allen, who has worked at EMC Canada for five years and helped set up branch offices in Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton, said the restructuring will merge professional services and technical resources into a single pool to better supply more of a solution focus to EMC’s clients.
“”I think the client will notice it in that this brings more autonomy to the Canadian organization,”” he said. “”Decisions that might have required us to go outside of the country can now be decided inside the country.””
According to Toronto-based Evans Research, EMC Canada lags behind rivals like HP and IBM in storage area network products. HP and IBM both have substantial Canadian operations with local management teams.
Storage analyst Arun Taneja said vendors tend to increase their presence in a country only after they have failed to gain enough market share.
“”There’s no question in my mind that your success in any country — and I’m talking American companies operating outside — the results that they produce in a particular region are 100 per cent reflective of the person that they have in that country,”” he said. “”It’s almost a direct correlation.””
Allen said EMC sees the SME as its fastest-growing segment. While large enterprises are focused on achieving increased utilization of existing storage, SMEs are recognizing the importance of external storage devices. While the direct attached storage market is shrinking, there is some movement of external devices to the lower commercial sector, he said.
“”Since it’s growing the fastest, and Dell has a prevalent space there, we think we can leverage up on that,”” he said, referring to the firm’s alliance with the direct computing giant. “”That’s not to the exclusion of other partners.””
EMC Monday said it had formed another partnership, this time with BMC Software, whereby it will acquire rights to the latter’s Patrol Storage Manager software. In return, BMC Software will resell EMC’s ControlCenter product line as its exclusive storage resource management tool. EMC also launched a revamped reseller program called Velocity on Monday.
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