'Today, we are going to focus more of our coverage on SMBs,' Ronnie Latinazo, EMC Philippines country manager, said in a press briefing. EMC's packages for SMBs range from US$15,000-$50,000.
According to Latinazo, common SMB requirements today involve addressing these challenges: continuous growth of information requirements; the need to reduce complexity and cost especially with a lean IT budget and limited or no IT staff; and higher availability demands on the business.
He added most SMBs would then take on traditional attempts to solve such challenges, like adding more servers and storage capacity, purchasing more tape and tape drives, delaying upgrades, and acquiring tactical point products.
The packages introduced by EMC center on key business tasks for growing companies, which the company describes as the 'A to E of storage': archive and compliance, backup and recovery, consolidation, disaster recovery, and exchange migration and recovery.
'We are going to offer what we used to offer at the higher end at a price point that would be attractive to SMBs through express solutions to be delivered through channel partners,' said Teddy Sumulong, EMC Philippines channels manager.
All packages are bundled with EMC Clariion CX networked storage systems and various software offerings, including network backup software, EmailXtender e-mail archiving software, MirrorView remote replication software, ApplicationXtender fixed content management software, and VMware server virtualization software.
Through these product offerings, EMC hopes to reach out to the SMBs by providing 'right-sized' options for the major IT needs of this market and help them achieve the benefits of information lifecycle management (ILM).
EMC has also contracted a third-party telemarketing firm to continuously try to identify the needs of its SMB market base. 'SMBs don't have time to experiment so they are more interested in what other people have done in best practices,' said Latinazo. 'SMBs can start small but think big.'