According to a recent Gartner Report on the storage market (march 9th), EMC stays the biggest and grows faster then others. Then new big blue had 31.7% market share in 2011, forcing others to take drastic measures.
These are the runner ups: IBM (14.2%) / NetApp (11.5%) / HP (9.8%) / HDS (9.4%) / DELL (7.4%).
HELL Inc:
No one wants to be the runner up, and especially not off the podium. HP and DELL recently decided to team against all others. To show off their ambitions marketing has proposed calling this cooperation HELL inc. and added the Piranha as symbol. From the start HELL would be in second place (Silver=17,2%) but will keep on biting small chunks from the EMC market share.
Channel:
HP and DELL are both very Channel driven enterprises. Channel is the cheapest sales force for an Enterprise IT Vendor. Therefore HELL has chosen only to work with companies that are both HP Gold Partner and DELL Premier Partner.
Training and Certification:
Both companies have different certification tracks for their servers and storage products. A compromise had to be made. To make it easier for the Channel Partners to get certified the HP ExpertOne program has been chosen as the platform but the exams and training will be free of charge and web-based.
HP has 3 levels of technical certification: AIS / ASE and Master ASE. The new level that has been created for this program is the Master HellRaiser. A Master HellRaiser will do 3 exams for each specific market horizontal:
- SMB: DELL PowerVault, HP P2000
- Mid Market: DELL Equallogic, HP P4000, HP P6000
- Enterprise: DELL Compellent, HP P10000
Official Press Release: LINK