HDS training up partners for enterprise sales

Four specialisation areas

HDS wants its top partners to become more specialised to sell its storage gear into enterprises.

Enterprise provide around 80 per cent of HDS revenues as they buy the majority of the mid-range HDS storage as well as the high-end VSP. HDS wants its partners to take on more professional services skills in consulting and the identification, design and implementation of customer projects for enterprise customers. Partners can use HDS training to become more specialised in the virtualisation, migration, file and content, and certain application and vertical market areas that map to HDS product capabilities.

HDS hopes that its partners can compete better against other storage vendors and their partners such as Dell and EMC by getting more skilled.

Virtualisation means the VSP array and so too does migration where the VSP can virtualise other suppliers' storage behind the VSP. File and content is focussed on the Hitachi Content Platform and unstructured data. Specialization – enables partners to identify, design and implement storage solutions for their customers’ unstructured data. Certified partners can add services in Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) enablement, NAS enablement and data discovery with Hitachi Data Discovery Suite (HDDS).

HDS is also adding application specialisations focussed on Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Symantec and VMware, plus vertical market specialisation such as healthcare and government.

Viglen is one UK HDS partner that sees itself as being able to meet and beat the tier one good guys in the UK through this expanded HDS True North specialisation programme, according to its CEO Bordan Tkachuk.

HDS does not see the cloud computing model as being anywhere near maturity yet. For example, Tkachuk said Microsoft's Azure was too expensive for the education market. Cloud computing is in an evolutionary phase and both HDS and its partners can develop and extend products, services and skill-sets as the cloud grows. ®