Storage giant EMC has extended its managed services portfolio, boosts support for ILM

EMC has extended its managed services portfolio with products designed to help customers control and expand complex storage solutions required to support information lifecycle management (ILM) strategies.

The portfolio includes Residency Services that charge a monthly fee to provide onsite EMC engineers to help with provisioning and diagnostics; a Managed Utility Service that charges customers only for the capacity they use; and Storage Management Services (SMS) that assigns EMC staff to large corporate customers managing over 100TB of data.

UK customers can call upon the services of almost 70 EMC experts, said Tom Hughes director of EMC's managed services offering in the UK, who says there are already individual UK customers relying on 20 or more storage professionals.

"It won't always be an engineer but customers will get an individual that they can call upon. In most circumstances it will be a person from EMC, but we will call on partners for more network centric problems, as well as consultants, systems integrators and resellers." he said.

EMC is not a newcomer to the services market, but denied it is seeking to offset sluggish equipment sales by offering a management and maintenance wrap around its hardware and software solutions.

"EMC has been delivering solutions for a number of years, and it hasn't specifically affected product revenues. We are focussing on selling the solutions that customers have asked us to bring to market" added Hughes.

The balance of EMC's business mix has shifted from being hardware centric (46%) to favouring software and services (54%), with the latter category growing much faster than the hardware piece year on year.