Business continuity, Midmarket, MSP, Networking, Storage

EMC, EY Pursue Midmarket Managed Services

Francis Nemia
Francis Nemia

EMC and EY (the former Ernst & Young) are expanding their longstanding partnership. Among the expected results: EY, leveraging EMC solutions, will accelerate its midmarket managed services push. Moreover, EY is looking to work more closely with the EMC Federation of companies -- including Pivotal, RSA, the former VCE (now EMC Converged Platform Division), Virtustream and VMware.

Francis J. Nemia (EY's Global Sponsor of the EY/EMC Alliance) and Dave Wood (Global Account Manager at EMC) explained the strategy to ChannelE2E yesterday.

First, the nuts and bolts of the official announcement. The EY and EMC relationship is focusing on co-innovation and joint offerings that include hybrid cloud enablement, data center network virtualization and segmentation, enterprise mobility management, governance risk & compliance (GRC), and cybersecurity services, among others.

Vertical Market Opportunities

Among the key vertical markets the duo continues to target: The insurance sector, where EY’s Insurance Nexus portfolio has caught on with customers. The two companies are also launching Isolated Recovery -- which combine cyber, business impact analysis, resiliency services and technology capabilities from both EMC and EY firms to secure vital company data.

"It's really about taking the relationship to the next level," says Wood. "Our market capabilities and their presence in the boardroom within regulated industry verticals makes for a great relationship. In the past, our relationship was opportunistic around security, risk and governance. Now we're looking at a broader portfolio." Indeed, EY will build a growing portfolio of managed services atop EMC's platforms, Wood added.

A prime example: EY has strong momentum with insurance companies, and will work with EMC to further penetrate mid-tier and small market insurance firms -- a sector that includes 2,000 to 3,000 or so companies, Wood said.

EY and the EMC Federation: VMware and More

EY's Nemia, meanwhile, has managed the company's EMC relationship for six years. "It was really a vendor to vendor relation ship -- buying and reselling in the early years. But we saw more and more opportunities to work together. We were in the same accounts, but walking different floors. What if we walked the floors together?" Those efforts will include joint engagements across financial services, healthcare and more, Nemia added.

So what's next? EY is exploring ways to work more closely with the EMC Federation of companies -- Pivotal, RSA, the former VCE (now EMC Converged Platform Division), Virtustream and VMware. In fact, EY met with VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger at the recent RSA Conference in California. "The alliance strategy looks across the entire Federation of offerings -- and explores opportunities around each aspect of the Federation," says Nemia.

Translation: EY's midmarket managed services will stretch beyond EMC's platforms to include other Federation components. Stay tuned.

Joe Panettieri

Joe Panettieri is co-founder & editorial director of MSSP Alert and ChannelE2E, the two leading news & analysis sites for managed service providers in the cybersecurity market.