VMware Explore: Still a Massive Multicloud Opportunity for VMware Partners
VMware's cloud journey has just started.
![VMware partners at VMware Explore 2023 VMware partners at VMware Explore 2023](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt1095ecbeff8559ac/6523ea26cc0091762f18d070/VMWare-Explore-Monday-Cover-8-21.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
VMware sales teams are now focused on the corporate and strategic tier, and commercial is now partner led, said VMware’s Ricky Cooper.
“This at first gave me a little bit of a heart attack thinking, ‘OK, let’s see if this motion works, how it’s going to go,” he said. “But in the first two quarters of this year, we’ve had phenomenal results. We’ve got a small digital team that helps you with preparing quotes, etc. My dream there is that we get to a situation where our distributors are able to help us with preparing the quotes, making sure that the orders are processed correctly. We’ve been investing in the APIs to make sure that that happens and connecting us all extremely well. But that’s a motion that we want to pass to you so that your rewards can then therefore be increased, helping us in that commercial market.”
Many VMware customers who were just using one of the three parts of the company’s platform are saying it’s time to consolidate, said VMWare’s Sumit Dhawan.
“There is a ton of value in it because a) they trust the innovation coming from VMware and our partner base, and b), because once you consolidate the amount of information that we can now provide to our customers through rich data, that helps them provide a more autonomous and more secure and better user experience that is far better than having silos,” he said. “We’ve had tremendous success there. You have had tremendous success there. From base services all the way to custom services that can be built on this solution, the opportunity for all of you has been great.”
VMware has three solutions in the market and “all of them we feel great about,” Dhawan said.
“We look at our business momentum, we look at our customer satisfaction, we look at our customer adoption, and more importantly we look at partner adoption with your skills and how you’ve trained your teams with our portfolio, they’re all trending in the right direction,” he said. “Earlier this year we introduced another product for edge — VMware Edge Compute Stack. The product has done extremely well.”
During the partner keynote, Dhawan reaffirmed VMware‘s commitment to partners.
“We can’t and we couldn’t have achieved the results we have achieved so far without partners,” he said. “And we can’t achieve what we seek to accomplish in the future without you. We are committed to not just driving all this innovation, but removing all the imperfections that we know we have in terms of dealing with you. And all I seek is your commitment to VMware, because together we solve what customers are looking for what we have called this cloud-smart approach. Part of this commitment is to make sure we continue to evolve, we continue to offer the programs, the capabilities that you’re looking for, for ease of doing business with us.”
Anna Lawler, VMware‘s vice president of partner marketing, led a panel discussion including Tracy-Ann Palmer, vice president; Eileen Gibson, senior director of global channel accounts and GTM; and Tara Fine, vice president of Americas channel sales.
Fine talked about best practices she’s seeing from VMware’s most successful partners.
“The first one is around practice development and ensuring our partners really think about ensuring they’re capable, they can meet our customers where they are, they’re investing in pre-sales discovery and they’re prepared to help our customers along their journey,” she said. “The second would be investment, and by investment I mean co-investment with VMware. And that could be seen in a couple of different ways, but the one that I think about is really understanding our programs and how our partners are profitable. We’ve really invested in making sure we’re enabling our partners to be successful with our customers. And so our ask to our partners and what really we’ve seen in terms of a best practice are those partners who really understand the program and how to optimize it.”
Third is around engagement, Fine said. That includes engagement with VMware’s field teams, programs and partner business managers across the board “and making sure that we understand how to go to market and be successful together.”
“Every partnership is based on trust and it is foundational in every relationship we have and in terms of our success with our partners and VMware, it’s no different,” she said.
VMware’s Eileen Gibson told partners relationships matter and gone are the days “when we were providing services on an ad hoc basis.”
“In order to get those deeply integrated relationships, you’ve got to really work on those relationships,” she said. “You need to have trust in us. We need to have trust in you. Same thing goes with the global partners. Do you want to get in those lighthouse customer opportunities where we’re releasing joint invested offerings in the marketplace like ML/AI, edge? Pick your poison. We’ve got to build those relationships, so this is the place to do it. We’re looking forward to another great year.”
Dave McGraw, VMware’s vice president, reiterated the massive, continuing multicloud opportunity.
“We’ve had a lot of customer conversations over the last year and there are a couple of key things here,” he said. “One is we’re hearing that there is a massive open opportunity for multicloud. Eight out of 10 of the customers we’re talking to have not implemented a multicloud strategy yet. So that’s your opportunity to get in and be that trusted advisor, integrator and potentially, operator. And so we see that as just huge upside. And cloud chaos is still very prevalent today. So we are advocating for a cloud smart strategy, placing workloads where there’s the right structure of privacy, compliance and cost efficiency. And there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity for all of us in the room.”
In terms of other cloud trends, McGraw said there are hundreds of millions of applications, with about 500 million that were built over the last few years and another 500 million coming.
“So when we look at the cloud space, it’s not just about infrastructure and infrastructure as a service (IaaS),” he said. “It’s really about providing modern applications, infrastructure and development capabilities. So when I look at that, I look at not only Cloud Foundation, but layering in as an example a persona-based, outcome-focused solution with our Tanzu platform. So what we’ve done is we’ve been on the journey, we’ve learned with our portfolio that we need to be able to provide solution-specific answers for our customers.”
Dave McGraw, VMware’s vice president, reiterated the massive, continuing multicloud opportunity.
“We’ve had a lot of customer conversations over the last year and there are a couple of key things here,” he said. “One is we’re hearing that there is a massive open opportunity for multicloud. Eight out of 10 of the customers we’re talking to have not implemented a multicloud strategy yet. So that’s your opportunity to get in and be that trusted advisor, integrator and potentially, operator. And so we see that as just huge upside. And cloud chaos is still very prevalent today. So we are advocating for a cloud smart strategy, placing workloads where there’s the right structure of privacy, compliance and cost efficiency. And there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity for all of us in the room.”
In terms of other cloud trends, McGraw said there are hundreds of millions of applications, with about 500 million that were built over the last few years and another 500 million coming.
“So when we look at the cloud space, it’s not just about infrastructure and infrastructure as a service (IaaS),” he said. “It’s really about providing modern applications, infrastructure and development capabilities. So when I look at that, I look at not only Cloud Foundation, but layering in as an example a persona-based, outcome-focused solution with our Tanzu platform. So what we’ve done is we’ve been on the journey, we’ve learned with our portfolio that we need to be able to provide solution-specific answers for our customers.”
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.
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