Image Gallery: EMC World, Partner Summit Light Up Vegas

This week’s EMC World in Las Vegas was truly a visual spectacle.

The event, with the theme of “Modernize the Data Center,” drew thousands to the Venetian & Sands Expo for keynotes featuring EMC CEO Joe Tucci and Dell founder Michael Dell; a Solutions Expo that rivaled the lights on the Las Vegas Strip; a Global Solutions Partner Summit; and more.

Partners, customers, analysts and media from countries around the world learned about new products and services offered by the storage behemoth, and, of course, what the future of a combined Dell-EMC might look like.

Channel Partners was there. Our image gallery has the highlights.

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This picture doesn’t do the size of EMC World justice. It could’ve taken five minutes to walk from one end of the keynote stage to the other.

Here, thousands packed the room to say so long to longtime CEO Joe Tucci and to hear from Dell founder Michael Dell.

Photo courtesy EMC

Valued at nearly $70 billion, Dell’s acquisition of EMC is considered to be the biggest in tech history, so it was only appropriate that the leaders of the two giants took the stage for a little chat about the future.

Joe Tucci, EMC’s CEO, will step into an advisory role once the sale of his company is complete. He told the crowd that the deal is a natural merger of two complementary businesses — a combined company that’s now strong in servers, storage, virtualization, cloud infrastructure and PCs.

When asked about EMC’s channel partners, Tucci said, “If you look at EMC partners or Dell partners, it’s not as if there are a lot of big ones that we are lacking. We want to go deeper with those partners that we already have.”

Photo courtesy EMC

Up until a few years ago, Dell wasn’t necessarily seen as channel-friendly. But that’s all changed, said Michael Dell.

“The channel partners have already completed the integration. They’re selling them together as one solution,” Dell said. “What we’ve observed is if you take the EMC channel program and the Dell program and put them side by side, they’re actually very similar. I see the same or more excitement from the channel as I do from the end customer.”

Read more here.

Photo courtesy EMC

World Wide Technology (pictured with EMC executives) and Avnet each took home two major awards at the EMC Global Partner Summit, an event within the event. View the full list of winners here.

Partners heard from CEOs Tucci and Dell, as well as EMC channel leaders, who gave updates on the company’s partner program.

Scott Millard, VP, Americas Channel, said the partner-program refresh that debuted a year has been 22 percent more profitable than the old Velocity program. Sales of converged infrastructure and all-flash arrays are up significantly. Partners contributed to the best-ever quarter (Q1 2016) for the EMC Americas channel. He also explained some new sales incentives. (Read more here.)

EMC channel chief Gregg Ambulos outlined what partners can expect over the next several months as the finishing touches are put on the merger with Dell.

What was Peyton Manning going to do after he drank those Budweisers after the Super Bowl? Get on the speaking circuit, apparently.

Manning regaled Partner Summit attendees with some stories of his playing days, but spent much of the time talking about how he had to rely on his teammates more than ever this past year — a lesson easily translated to the business world.

Occupying a large viewing area in the Solutions Expo was a display of EMC’s cutting-edge data-center products.