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EMC: We know this much is True, our rebate deal is 'illegal' in the EU

Sales kicker off menu for channel sellers on this side of Atlantic

Canalys Channels Forum The cash cannon EMC fired at channel partners in the US who vowed to transact the lion's share – if not all – of their storage business with the vendor will not cross the pond, in its current form at least.

The True rebate programme was pushed out at this summer’s EMC World in Las Vegas, and was intended to be a staggered global roll out, but fell foul of EU anti-competitive laws.

The sales mechanism pays out rebates to third-party suppliers that give an 80 per cent share of storage spending to EMC, and even more for those that work exclusively with the disk titan.

Philippe Fosse, EMC EMEA veep of channel, told us that in its current form, True is “simply illegal” in Europe.

“We can’t launch it in the EU in the same structure [as in the US], we are trying to find a different way to do it but we can’t find that solution at the moment,” he said.

The sales scheme is currently being pushed out to EMC’s channel in the Middle East and Africa, but European partners are nonplussed about the bypassing of their region.

Large resellers and integrators we spoke to complained smaller rivals who handed over a far larger proportion of their business to EMC may have been able to undercut those that hadn’t.

And the rebate programme would have diluted the so-called independence or vendor agnostic approach that suppliers are supposed to take when recommending tech to a customers. ®

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