As the world’s biggest storage vendor, EMC regularly finds itself at the center of attention in IT industry circles, both among partners and rivals. We’ve seen that yet again this week following two significant ecosystem updates, the most important of which is the harmonization of the VCE channel program.

Established in 2009 as a joint venture between EMC and Cisco to develop converged infrastructure solutions that combine compute, storage and networking in a single pre-configured chassis, VCE has seen tremendous growth in the five years since its foundation, recently surpassing $1 billion in annual revenue thanks to accelerating enterprise demand. But its success has been hampered by tensions in the relationship between  its two backers, which has taken a significant hit by VMware’s $1.2 billion acquisition of software-defined networking startup Nicira in July 2012 and never fully recovered.

In the field, the conflict between the two industry stalwarts has reportedly manifested itself in active rivalry between their respective sales organizations, competition that contributed to the creation of an unnecessarily complex business environment for VCE partners. The pair hopes to change that with the newly launched Cloud Infrastructure Solutions Accelerator, which aims to provide resellers with the resources they need to tap into the growing demand for converged systems and set themselves apart in the market.

To be eligible for the program, a company has to qualify as a Cloud Infrastructure Solutions Builder, which requires achieving VCE Silver standing or higher or being certified to sell EMC VSPEX solutions to customers with Cisco gear in their data centers. Once they’re in, partners receive access to all the usual channel benefits, including sales training resources, exclusive deal registration support and financial incentives, namely rebates and discounts. The two vendors are also offering joint planning sessions meant to enable the creation of tailored business plans.

The competition is never far behind

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While Cisco has opted to cooperate with EMC towards their mutual benefit, Hewlett-Packard is going on the offensive with the addition of support for the storage vendor’s midrange VNX  and CLARiiON CX4 systems to its 3PAR Online Import software. The tool utilizes “federated storage innovations” to remove reliance host resources during the migration process and eliminate the need for specialized software or additional hardware appliances, the firm said.

Moving data from one array to another adds about 54 percent to the overall price of the new system, according to the recent study by Wikibon, taking into account factors such as downtime planning and maintenance. By reducing that overhead, HP is delivering a clear upgrade path that makes its products that considerably more attractive to CIOs, who might otherwise be put off by the complexity and risk associated with transferring their information to an entirely different platform.