ARC 2011: Enterprise Network Storage

WINNER: EMC

EMC swept all three major subcategories to win this year's Annual Report Card survey for Enterprise Network Storage, holding on over a strong showing from second-place NetApp and leaving its other competitors far beyond.

EMC beat all the competition in the product innovation, support and partnership subcategories, and indeed made nearly a clean sweep of all the individual factors in each category, being topped by NetApp only in terms of richness of product features and ease of doing business.

Leonard Iventosch, vice president of Americas channel at EMC, was disappointed his company missed those two criteria in the ARC survey. Iventosch said that a company with as broad a portfolio as EMC could appear complex.

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"We will be working on integrating all the parts involved in the quoting and ordering of our storage," he said. However, Iventosch said he cannot understand how someone might consider EMC's richness of product features second to anyone else's. "I have to accept the partners voted that way," he said. "If the survey was a point feature comparison, it's hard to say. But if on a broad level, it's a category we would have won."

EMC's strength against the competitors in the support subcategory stems from a model that makes it easy for partners to do business, Iventosch said.

"For a company of our maturity with the successes we have, support is a table stake," he said.

Jamie Shepard, executive vice president of technology solutions at ICI, a Marlborough, Mass.-based EMC solution provider, said he has seen major changes at EMC over the last couple of years as the vendor acquired such disparate companies as Data Domain, Avamar and Kashya, and started moving to integrate them via software such as its Unisphere management application.

EMC used to have two solutions, namely block storage via its Clariion and VMax, and file storage via its Clerra, Shepard said.