VMware Explore: Still a Massive Multicloud Opportunity for VMware Partners

VMWARE EXPLORE 2023 — VMware partners are ideally situated for an AI-powered future, but multicloud still provides massive opportunity for revenue generation.

That was one of the messages shared during the partner keynote Monday at VMware Explore 2023. The four-day event is being held in Las Vegas. Ricky Cooper, VMware’s head of worldwide partner and commercial sales, told VMware partners that this is the “age of the partner,” and they’re “in the driver’s seat.”

VMware’s Ricky Cooper

“The reality now is you,” he said. “You’re the advisors to our customers. You’re piecing it together. VMware may be a small piece of this. You’re putting together the solutions. So we want to help you and make sure that you’ve got the right tools, the right structure and the right rewards to make that happen.”

Empowering, Certifying VMware Partners

As VMware partners become empowered and certified, “we believe there’s a partner booking return for every dollar of VMware of 18 to 1” for those who invest in Ignite versus those that don’t, Cooper said. In addition, average annual bookings for partners with a solution competency have increased 315%.

“As we pass more and more on to partners, our role is to make sure that you’re certified and make sure you’re trained, make sure you’re enabled,” he said. “So anything we can do to help you there, please. Your ideas have been fantastic. Keep them coming. What do you need? What is it that we can help you with? So my goal is to make sure that the ease of doing business at VMware for you is taken into consideration every single day.”

Cooper said his ask for partners is “we’re not done with cloud.”

“We’ve only really just started with cloud,” he said. “We talk about cloud-first; our belief is many still don’t have a cloud strategy. Then you go into the cloud chaos. How do you manage, how do you secure, how do you make sure it’s resilient? We’re helping our customers every single day with this. And really, there are a handful of customers who may have that whole piece worked out, but there are so many that don’t. So together we’ll go with you on the AI journey, but there’s still so much opportunity for us in that cloud space and the vision in front of us — the multicloud era.”

Massive Total Addressable Market for VMware Partners

Sumit Dhawan, VMware’s president, said there’s a $160 billion total addressable market (TAM) that the company is serving with its solutions.

VMware’s Sumit Dhawan

“And we have estimated for you that’s three-to-10 times depending on the type of solution in terms of type of services,” he said. 

Earlier this year, VMware announced its VMware Cross-Cloud managed services and the program is now active, Dhawan said.

“That means that our partner programs with incentives to our MSPs are all active,” he said. “You have the flexibility to use our technology with managed services options. No more sales conflicts … and how we offer our sales teams incentives are fully aligned. We can go create demand, fulfill them using this program and by dropping as much complexity as possible so that from coding to fulfillment, we’re streamlining it. I guarantee you it’s not going to be perfect to begin with. But it’s far better where we have removed the conflict in the best interest of both you and, more importantly, our customers.”

Scroll through our slideshow above for all the highlights from Monday at VMware Explore 2023.