Disclaimer: I worked for HDS in a professional services capacity for 2 yrs.

HDS has always been a much underestimated player in the storage market. In most regions they seem to have a softer touch than EMC. This seems like a good play for the market. Soft touch, show the customer some value... and if they decide that another vendor provides perks that HDS cannot, at least HDS hasn't sunk a ton of unpaid time into the up front evaluation.

This way the customer owns any data used to pitch the proposal as well, so they can have EMC or whoever do a pitch with the given data...