EMC today announced it is strengthening its commitment to the EMC partner community with the unification of its ISV partner programs under the new Velocity ISV program, and enhancements to the EMC Velocity Partner Program for solution providers. Both announcements make it easier for the growing number of partners offering EMC's full range of products to work with EMC. Today's news was delivered at the company's second annual software partner conference to a crowd of nearly 700 resellers, distributors, system integrators and independent software vendors. The new Velocity ISV program brings EMC's multiple ISV programs under a single framework, leveraging the best practices from each and dramatically enhancing the program's scope and benefits. Partners creating integrations and/or building products that utilize EMC's industry leading software and tiered storage offerings will have access to Velocity ISV's rich set of educational, technical, marketing, and sales resources. The program is designed to help partners accelerate time-to-market, increase sales opportunities, and drive their own business objectives by taking advantage of EMC's global resources more effectively. To better align partners' businesses with EMC's technology initiatives, the Velocity ISV program offers five specialties with specific resources tailored to each technical area. Partners' increased commitment to a specialty will be rewarded with increased investment from EMC in marketing and promoting the partner's solutions. Those partners that attain several specialties will experience a consistent set of resources and processes across their business with EMC, including one of the industry's best certification programs. Dave DeWalt, President of EMC Software Group, said, "Over the past year EMC has received positive feedback from partners and increased revenues because of efforts to unite our channel programs. This year we are expanding the Velocity umbrella to include more of our important and rapidly growing partner community, as well as adding new benefits and enhancing existing ones to continue making it easy to work with EMC. ISVs play a critical role in enhancing the investment customers make in implementing EMC solutions. The Velocity ISV program will enable more and more solutions to leverage EMC's broad portfolio of information management and storage products." EMC continues to make significant investment in the Velocity Partner Program by offering new and innovative programs and tools that expand the benefits offered to solution providers. Understanding there are certain unique partner business models that satisfy high growth verticals, Velocity now has tailored programs for Healthcare and Federal solution providers to make them more successful and competitive in these respective markets. EMC continues to focus on making its partners more self-sufficient in marketing and servicing EMC products and solutions. One example is the EMC Showcase tool which syndicates content from EMC's Web site, EMC.com, directly to a partner's Web site and embeds it in the partners' container page to not only eliminate the time spent updating product information but more importantly accelerating the partner's time to sale. At the conference, EMC software ISVs are being provided with the necessary information on becoming a part of EMC's Velocity ISV program, which will take effect in April.