In the year since it was announced, EMC’s VSPEX validated infrastructure pattern program has proven to be a vital tool for EMC channel partners serving midrange customers, says Kent Christiansen, visualization practice lead for EMC channel partner Datalink. When it was announced a year ago it was a big olive branch to the channel, he said in an interview with SiliconAngle founder/CEO John Furrier and Wikibon Analyst Stuart Miniman. It meant that EMC was relinquishing partial control to channel partners.

Today, he said, 50 percent-to-60 percent of EMC’s business comes through the channel, and VSPEX is a major reason for that. Companies of all sizes are making the transition to private and hybrid cloud computing. Large enterprises with large, sophisticated IT organization (ITOs) generally want to build & control their own clouds. Midrange companies with much smaller ITOs “realize that they need help, and they want us to help them,” he said.

VSPEX allows the channel partner to customize a customer’s cloud architecture to its needs and existing environment, to provide the services it needs and recycle much of its existing hardware infrastructure while creating the company’s internal cloud, without requiring that the channel partner build everything from scratch.

“A customer will already have servers that might be from a third-party vendor or bought through another supplier,” Christiansen said. “One of the first things they ask is, ‘Can we use the servers we have?’ With VSPEX they can.” VSPEX provides the blueprint for including those servers in the new cloud architecture, saving the customer a great deal of CAPEX while allowing the customer and channel partner to work together to build the private cloud quickly and confidently.

Customers also have their own list of services they want to provide, and again VSPEX provides the blueprints to build those services quickly. Speed and guaranteed QoS are particularly important because one of the motivations midrange IT shops have for jumping into the cloud is shadow IT. Apps dev groups in particular, he says, often will move small projects to the public cloud, and the next thing IT knows company data is being moved out to unsecure platforms.

“We often have meetings between the two groups [IT and apps development],” he said. “We say to dev, ‘We understand the problem with delivering what you need in four weeks or four days. How would four hours work?’”

That is what internal cloud based on VSPEX can deliver. And the great thing about it, he says, is “If we can have customers jointly realize that transition [with us], then they are your customers for a long time.”