If you haven’t yet had a chance to check out our new Implementer’s Lab, you’re missing out. Mark Jones, Director of Technical Marketing, described it on the inaugural post of his new Implementer’s Lab blog as “a place where we will discuss how to use our products from your perspective… with tools to show you how to use Emulex products as an element of a bigger application solution.”

Implementer’s Lab Benefits for Channel Partners

The Implementer’s Lab hosts a variety of resources from technical how-to guides for download to interactive webinars, blogs and videos. Mark Jones affirmed in his blog that all of the materials presented by the Implementer’s Lab “have been confirmed by our engineers, on the accurate steps to take using the latest versions of software available to us at the time of writing.”

How-To guides – The Solution Implementer Series:

• Educate and sell to the technical end user with these relevant and highly technical resources.
• Take a solution-oriented sales approach with OEM-specific sales enablement tools.
• Learn practical steps for deploying emerging solutions, including virtualization.

OEM Solution Sales Sheets:

• View an “at-a-glance” list of benefits for specific OEM solutions.
• Download our first example: Deploying 8Gb/s Fibre Channel with HP c-Class BladeSystem and ESX 4.1.

Implementer’s Lab blog by Emulex engineers:

• Stay apprised of the most timely I/O topics.
• Interact with the Emulex technical marketing team and other technical I/O professionals.

Videos and live and recorded webcasts:

• Watch on-demand technical training and education for OEM-specific and solution-specific technologies at the time that’s right for you.

Accessing the Implementer’s Lab

You can access the lab any time from the bottom of the Emulex.com home page, or from inside of the Emulex Connect Partner Program Sales and Technical tools tabs. You’ll also want to bookmark the Implementer’s Lab Blog and subscribe through your reader.

You can download a sample of the kinds of resources you’ll find on the Implementer’s Lab here: Deploying 8Gb/s Fibre Channel with HP c-Class BladeSystem and ESX 4.1. According to the Emulex Labs Blog, “The goal of this first Solution Implementers Guide is to assist those who will deploy for the first time an HP c-Class BladeSystem blade server with 8Gb/s Fibre Channel.”

So keep checking back because the team is working hard on their next guide on IBM System x servers, VMware vSphere and 8Gb/s Fibre Channel connectivity.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments

Since launching the new channel partner program last month, one aspect of the program I hear the most questions about is Project Registration. It’s a touchy subject. Whenever I read blogs or forums about how vendors can better serve their partners, discussions around project registration come up. I thought it would be a good idea project to shed a little light on how Emulex runs project registration in light of the controversies surrounding this type of program.

What’s the difference between project registration and deal registration?

We’ve set up our program to aid and reward your sales efforts from the very beginning of the sales cycle and all the way through to the end.

1. Register a project when you’ve discovered a potential opportunity, so Emulex can help you understand and pitch why Emulex is the best choice….and get a reward for telling us about the deal.
2. Register a deal when you’re locking in the sale and need to quote….and get margin enhancing special pricing.
3. Register a SPIF after the sale closes….and collect your rewards for closing Emulex business

How can we be trusted with end-user information?

To answer this question, I sat down with one of our Inside Sales reps, Crystal Potter. Crystal is one of the Emulex Sales representatives who receives end-user information when a project is registered.

“First of all, Emulex doesn’t sell direct. When a reseller registers a project with us and trusts us with their end-user information, we never call that customer directly without the express permission of the VAR partner. That’s not the way we work.” I told her about the many blogs and forum discussions I’d come across where I read stories of end-users’ information being dumped into general marketing databases or, even worse, being given to a competing VAR. “Emulex works hard to be a solid channel partner, which means building trust with the VAR community, this is why we use tools like project registration to ensure the integrity of our interactions with VARs.”

So how does project registration help you?

When you register a project, not only do you rack up voucher points for gift cards from a variety of vendors, you are also entered to win a fantastic vacation package. But there’s a lot more to it. Crystal summed it up best, “When you register your project with us, you become a valuable and supported member of our sales force.” In other words, Crystal and all of these sales resources are at your disposal:

1. Demo and proof of concept units: Crystal and her fellow sales team members can help to deploy the equipment you need that will help you close the deal.
2. Conference calls & webinars with Emulex technical experts: Crystal has had several great experiences with our partners when they include her or our technical experts on calls with their prospects.
3. A sales advocate in your corner: When you reach out to us by registering a project at the very beginning of the sales cycle, you have our help and support all the way through to the close of the deal.

Register your projects and win

We’ll handle your end-user data with integrity and make your success a top priority. That’s how our project registration works!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments

That was the question Howard Lo, Director of Channel Marketing, asked over and over at XChange Solution Provider in Orlando, Florida last month. And over and over we heard the same answer, “Fibre Channel HBAs.” While of course, Emulex is still going strong in Fibre Channel, Howard took the opportunity to playfully admonish our new friends at XChange by exclaiming:

“No! Haven’t you heard? Emulex is a networking company!” while holding up a 10-Gig NIC display.

A New Partner Program For A New Kind Of Partner

This is the reason we launched a brand new partner program last month. We launched this new program to help us build strategic relationships with a whole new category of resellers. The new partners we’re connecting with as a result of this launch may not have thought we were relevant to their business before. They knew us as the enterprise storage company focused on Fibre Channel. But anyone who attended XChange Solution Provider last month knows now that Emulex is a networking company focused on 10-Gbit Ethernet NIC business.

Off To A Winning Start

So far it’s been an amazing first month. We’ve already certified over 100 Emulex Experts who have completed sales or technical tracks of our new Emulex Expert Training program. We have 175+ new program members and are actively equipping them with sales tools like our new iCompete mobile app, easy access to demo cards, training and of course, generous deal registration discounts SPIFs. On top of everything, our new program won CRN’s 5-Star distinction in their 2011 Partner Program Guide.

Entry Level Benefits That Make It Worth Your Time From Day One

Because we really wanted to get it right, we spent a lot of time with our ear to the ground before building our new program. One of the biggest problems partners report is that vendors will let you in the front door, and then leave you hanging. There are usually very few benefits for the lowest tier and it’s a steep climb to even reach the next level. Some of our direct competitors don’t even offer SPIFs to their entry-level tier. We’ve been offering discounts and SPIFs to our Authorized partners for some time, but we’ve decided to pile on even more benefits. In addition, we’ve created some very simple mechanisms by which partners can reach higher tiers or achieve our new distinction: Connect+.

Transcending Tiers – The New Connect+ Distinction

Another way we offer increased benefits and opportunity is through our new Connect+ distinction. We want qualified partners of any tier level who focus their business on selling value-added, end-to-end networking solutions to get a new kind of VIP treatment including deeper discounts, premier placement on our website and targeted support.

Have You Joined Yet?

We’re getting ready to launch some great incentives for completing trainings, participating in Project Registration and more. Be sure you’re on board as we continue to launch our new program features. We look forward to meeting you and growing together. And, if you have joined, we’d love to hear your feedback. What’s working? What do you want more of?

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

With Thanksgiving behind us, our channel team is excited to unveil a new buffet-style resource center designed to help you sell 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) solutions, capitalize on this technology trend and make more money today.

The new channel resource site can be found at www.emulex.com/partners/channel-partners, and is a smorgasbord of 10GbE sales tools and resources that will help you dive into 10GbE opportunities to drive 10GbE business. To do this, we’ve targeted the menu of resources to answer three critical questions as you begin to capitalize on 10GbE technology:

1. Why should VARs care about 10GbE?
2. How will 10GbE help VARs sell more?
3. Why is Emulex the 10GbE platform of choice for VARs?

Let’s start with the first question: why should you care about 10GbE, and why do we care enough to create a resource center dedicated to helping you learn more about 10GbE solutions? One good reason is that a recent IT Brand Pulse survey found that 67% of enterprises say they are investigating or deploying 10GbE today. Want more reasons backed by documented industry research? Visit the site to find out more.

Next, are you a little curious how 10GbE can really help you sell more? For starters, 10GbE is optimized for virtualization, and market trends report that customers are earnestly moving from 1 Gigabit Ethernet to 10GbE to meet bandwidth requirements for virtualized deployments. We’ve got customer case studies and analyst papers to help you outline the steps you can take to guide you customers with a smooth transition to a 10GbE infrastructure. Visit the site to find out more.

And last, we don’t just tell you that the Emulex OneConnect UCNA 10GbE solution is the platform of choice, we support that statement. You’ll read compelling performance benchmarks, industry awards, and testimonials from customers and VARs that have jumped into the 10GbE pool early and are already immersed in the benefits of convergence, including higher performance and reliability, cost savings, and simplified management. Visit the site to find out more.

In a nutshell, the Emulex Channel Team is serious about helping you sell 10GbE solutions, so we’re loading you up with healthy portions of marketing and sales tools that will help you sketch your game plan early and start making money faster, with a variety of choices that include product training, sales sheets, white papers, benchmarks, analyst data, market trends, competitive studies, customer success stories, VAR testimonials, and more. You won’t walk away hungry, but you will walk away better able to:

• Identify 10GbE sales opportunities
• Articulate key OneConnect 10GbE UCNA technology benefits to your customers
• Speak more confidently about the business value of 10Gb Ethernet
• Meet the growing needs of your customers in virtualized deployments

Best of all, you can finish it off with a great cup of coffee at Starbucks. Register here before you enter the “Sell 10GbE Solution” site and we’ll send you a complimentary Starbucks gift card. Bon appetite!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments

In today’s world, IT departments are fighting a battle on two fronts. On one front the requirements on them are increasing:

• Users are sending, receiving, creating and needing to store more data than ever before. The ramifications of which are more storage, power, cooling, cabling etc. leading to “Moore’s law of data”.
• Quick fixes in the past have led to extremely complicated networks, running different technologies – which are difficult to manage and maintain.
• Users are requiring higher performance applications (such as Windows 2008, VOD, web 2.0) all of which are creating bandwidth issues in the network.

On the other front the finance department and managing director want to cut capital and operational expenditure, and are measuring the IT department by their service levels and spend.

To combat these increasing demands IT departments are seeking to simplify their networks as much as possible and are starting to consolidate and virtualise their hardware to make it easier to manage and less costly to run.

The market is also moving towards network convergence – we have already seen the voice networks converge, and are now starting to hear about data centre networks converging. This will enable data centre’s, which have traditionally run stove pipe networks, to run on Ethernet – which is much simpler and cheaper and will help (along with consolidation and virtualisation) reduce the spiralling costs of cabling, cooling and power.

In November Emulex launched a new adapter card (the Universal Converged Network Adapter, brand name OneConnect™) which for the first time combines a number of protocols in a single card, and will allow networks to converge multiple protocols over Ethernet.

Convergence is still very new to many, and in many regions of the world the market is just starting to learn, evaluate and test the technology and make plans for their data centre infrastructure, so product adoption will be a gradual transition.

Our aim as a channel marketing organisation, is to evangelise the future of data centre infrastructure, and empower the channel to ‘have intelligent conversations’ with their end customers on the value of I/O convergence enabling them to capitalise on this new major business opportunity.

With that said our EMEA channel organisation will piloting a “Cool Conversation” marketing campaign that will help enable our resellers to “have a conversation” with their customers about Data centre Infrastructure, and help them solve their Data centre network issues based on market leading Emulex technology.

Over the coming weeks and we will be offering our EMEA partners an integrated marketing toolset to educate them and drive I/O connectivity demand based on 4 conversation areas:

1. Virtualisation
2. I/O Performance
3. Data centre Efficiency
4. Network Convergence

Stay tuned for more details in a future blog, or feel free to contact our EMEA Channel Marketing Manager Julie Tatum (Julie.Tatum@emulex.com) for more details.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments

Emulex is a world-leading provider of converged network solutions for the data center, and this year, it celebrates its 30th anniversary as a company.  As our company continues to invest in the Asia market and build our market presence, Emulex participated in the COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2010 expo, the biggest ICT industry purchase expo in Asia and the second biggest in the world.

As they recover from the financial crisis, businesses share a positive attitude toward the market’s prospects. Thanks to the improving atmosphere, the COMPUTEX TAIPEI expo, which also enjoys its 30th anniversary, attracted the largest number of exhibitors this year. The expo was held from June 1 to June 5, 2010. It attracted some 35,017 companies from 216 countries and more than 120,000 visitors from all over the world. This Expo attracted top companies from Japan, China, Hong Kong, Korea and southeast Asia.

Continue reading…

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments

Over and over in conversations with resellers, Emulex has found that the choice of a Host Bus Adapter (HBA) (which is part of an overall solution as opposed to the solution driver itself) is often made more out of habit than based on product versus product or management requirements. One of the most common refrains is, “It worked last time and they already had QLogic…so why change?” In fact, many resellers who sell our OEM-branded HP, IBM and EMC products do not know that there is a difference in HBAs at all, much less whose technology is behind them. As the song says, this is one of those “things that make you say hmmm!” So, how do you break a bad habit? First, you have to recognize that there is a bad habit. Next, you need a new plan, and third, you have to put that plan into action. This leads us to a new program: Continue reading…

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments

“Help me help you” – Jerry Maguire

Many remember Tom Cruise speaking these famous words to Cuba Gooding. While Jerry Maguire was made in 1996, those words are just as poignant in today’s channel nearly 15 years later. Today’s VARs are selling products from a myriad of vendors to build multiple complex IT solutions for their customers. Which vendors get the mindshare from VARs? Which ones become their trusted “Go To” guys? Which ones become their trusted agent? The answer is simple…the ones that help them help their customers…the ones who can help them sell and the ones who help them keep the product sold.

Let’s take these one at a time. First is “Help Me Sell”. You look at just about any recent survey with regard to what VARs want from their vendors and the same items generally pop up at the top of the list. Bring me new business, train my people, and provide me with demo product. While almost all vendors tackle the last two items, not many are in a position to truly bring new business opportunities. Continue reading…

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Take the Emulex 10GbE Challenge and see how the Emulex OneConnect NIC stacks up against the competition.

We are so excited about the performance of our OneConnect™ 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) platform and the opportunities 10GbE presents to our channel partners that we’re equipping you to take the “Emulex 10GbE Challenge” to run head-to-head comparisons against our network interface card (NIC) competitors. Now that’s confidence.

The Emulex 10GbE Challenge was launched last week at Interop with the same burning question posed in the Pepsi vs. Coke challenge a few decades earlier: brand vs. taste, which one wins? With our 10GbE Challenge, we’re just as blunt: brand vs. performance? Intel vs. Emulex? We’re betting our partners will choose performance, hands down. The choice will be Emulex.

Why 10GbE, Why Emulex?

Many companies haven’t considered using 10GbE until recently. The adoption of 10GbE comes in response to ever-increasing demands for more bandwidth to support virtualized application workloads, faster network speed for larger data transfers and a more flexible network fabric for future convergence.

Emulex is leading and enabling the 10GbE server transition with OneConnect, our single-chip, high-performance 10GbE platform. There are many reasons why the Emulex 10GbE brand is more palatable in comparison tests with competitive brands, but performance tops the list. OneConnect provides the best server performance by offloading I/O processing from the server with the bonus option to add support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) or iSCSI storage networks with hardware-accelerated protocol offloads.

The 10GbE Market Will Be Huge

We believe it’s not a matter of when and if, but how and when our channel partners will capitalize on the 10GbE technology transition to grow their business. Customers moving to 10GbE are already buying new multi-core servers and installing OS updates, buying new switches and upgrading their network infrastructure and requiring more consulting, support and network management.

So, are you up for the challenge? Are you ready to take the 10GbE plunge? If you had to choose a NIC based on brand name or based on unbeatable 10GbE performance, which would it be? Intel vs. Emulex? Go to www.emulex.com/partners/channel-10gbe-challenge and take the challenge.

If the question is 10GbE, the answer is Emulex.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Welcome to the new Emulex Channel blog, which we hope will provide another valuable mechanism to disseminate information and solicit feedback easily on how we are supporting our valued channel partners that are servicing the Emulex business and helping us drive growth. Over coming weeks and months, you will see this blog used to educate and discuss areas such as major wins in the channel, case studies, quarterly programs, training, the Emulex Edge program, margin enablement, what’s going on in our specific geographic regions and details of the general investments being made to support you.

But for this first blog, we want to talk about change. On February 18, 2009, we announced “The New Emulex” as part of our 30th anniversary celebrations. The “New Emulex” consisted of a new strategy, new senior management team and new technology directions. We talked about the industry’s first Universal Converged Network Adapter (UCNA), the industry’s first encryption Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter (HBA) and the industry’s first convergence management framework, areas that we started to deliver on with our global OneConnect launch in October, and recent OEM design win announcements. Underpinning this, we launched a new www.emulex.com, solution sites, OEM sites, social media initiatives, a new partner program and many other things. So change has been aggressive and pervasive for Emulex.

However, there has been another major area with significant change that we have not done a particularly good job at articulating and wish to improve: what we have done to embrace, enable, support and motivate the channel, and more specifically, you, the value-added reseller (VAR) community. Historically, we have been a very heavily focused OEM company with limited interaction with VARs. Not that this approach was wrong at the time, but times do change. Over the last year, our organization has changed significantly on a global level to support the VAR community. In all regions of the world, we now have dedicated teams, including new inside sales resources, geared and with goals to specifically supporting and developing the VAR community. This in itself has been a major change and significant investment for Emulex. We have changed our marketing focus and increased spend significantly to support and enable our VARs. We have enhanced our incentive and partner programs, integrated into our partnerships reseller incentive programs and campaigns, started to deliver tools in local languages and tried our very hardest to think outside of the box about what we need to do to further support the channel. We have done a lot, but also know we still have a lot to do to truly differentiate ourselves in the channel and enable you to be as successful as you possibly can. As we move into the second half of 2010 and our new Emulex fiscal year, you will begin to see Emulex further deliver on our commitment to the channel. What’s our end-game? Simple: To enable you to be as successful as possible while making good margin sales with Emulex.

We will use this blog to communicate further enhancements in this area, gather feedback and, more importantly, listen to our partners. So for now, watch this space, and let us know how we are doing.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment