VMware’s New Partner Connect Program provides flexibility to address multiple markets

In a chat with VARINDIA, Pradeepto Dey, Director - Strategic Partner & Alliances, VMware Indiaand Manish Alshi, Director, Partner Sales, VMware India discuss about the new partner program, company’s go to market, its India growth strategy etc.

“Our growth strategy in India remains consistent over the years and we will continue to drive growth across our customers or partners. Partner Connect helps align with some of our growth strategies.” 

Pradeepto Dey
Director - Strategic Partner & Alliances, VMware India

Brief about VMware Partner Connect. 

VMware Partner Connect is something that we are all excited about and we should be able to get the details of the program subsequently. We have multiple strategic partnerships in the ecosystem that we refer to as our deal partnerships or alliance partnerships. We have our global SIs which is system integrators and strategic outsources. We have our OEM partners such as Dell, HP, Cisco, Lenovo, and the rest of the OEM ecosystem. We also have a host of cloud partners, which are also going to be under the new partner Connect program, we have our association with AWS, IBM Cloud, and Azure. From our end user computing standpoint, we have also partnered up with Apple, Samsung, Google and all these large devices vendors. This broadly is the ecosystem that really helps us drive deep outcomes for our customers. 

Post our acquisition of Pivotal, which is one of our focus areas of the company - Modern Applications, we are now going to come back in a renewed fashion, and engage with some of the application providers that are also operating. So, largely speaking, one partner program that encompasses and comprehensively addresses all these verticals of partnerships, including our classic solution providers as well as our distributors. 

With this new partner program, what would be the company's GTM structure for VAR?

The new Partner Connect program will operate in three tiers; we have the Partner, the Advanced Partner, and the Principal Partner. Most of our large partnerships that we have in the marketplace typically will fall in the Principal Partner tier. What is exciting for these guys really is the fact that most these guys have a 360 degree partnership with VMware, they will be a cloud partner, managed services partner, system integration partner, all of these different kinds of partnerships are now coming under one single umbrella across VMware solution offerings. Typically, the new Partner Connect program is also moving partnerships, away from a pure play product or resale orientation to more services orientation. When you do such things as a partner you need to build certain practices within your organization, and the new Partner Connect program, comprehensibly rewards partners for building these kinds of practices. So, over a period of time if you look at the changing landscape at a customer place, it is not possible for a single partner to have expertise across the entire digital transformation spectrum of all components of information technology in a digital transformation spectrum, so you will have pockets of excellence and this Partner Connect program actually picks up the relevant pockets of every partner type that really invests in getting expertise on a given competency or institution. 

“Now, in the new partner program, the partners actually have the choice and execution power to choose market according to their preference, and then address the customer's needs in a corner.”

Manish Alshi
Director, Partner Sales, VMware India

Brief about VMware Partner Connect. 

The new partner program, the VMware Partner Connect program have some sweeping changes in the program, while we have retained all the good parts of the previous program, we have also incorporated a lot of feedback and inputs; not just from the channel community, but also from our customers in terms of how they view our ecosystem and what is it that they expect from our ecosystems. This exercise has been going on for 12 months now, on various partner forums and customer forums. We've been collecting feedback as to what is the best way, not just to transact, but to track the inners of the ecosystem. Just to ensure that we offer optimum support to our customers in their digital transformation journeys. 

How is the new Partner Program different from the older Partner Program?

First is the partner program has evolved just the way advance market strategy has evolved. That effectively means that initially most of the focus was on resale licenses. Later on we actually evolved into different open markets as well. For example, at the same time there were partners who actually operated out of different markets. They were typically, larger partners and for each of these differences we had a different space that effectively meant that the partner had to sign a different agreement for each of these markets. That was one of the key differences. 

The second difference is the old partner program was an all-encompassing program, which actuallyrecognized partner peers, on an overall perspective. Despite having different solutions, your entire partner program actually had a uniform mechanism depending upon how much the new department has approved of the solution. Whereas in the new program what they have done is getting solution specific aspects.

What are you expecting with new partner program from the solution service providers?

It is difficult to put a percentage but just to give you a perspective, the two kinds of growth factors that we normally saw in terms of business plan we are funding is organic. What I mean by that is most of our business in India is actually through partners. We have about 25 active CPP partners, actually provide some stringent aspects on the embedded assumption in platform. But from an inorganic standpoint we have to look at the new acquisitions that VMware has made. Now, each of these has an intrinsic presence ecosystem that is already existing. So the inorganic growth actually stems from the fact that as we start to include these external ecosystems into our unified partner program. It also allows us to expand our GTM strategies into the Asian areas along with the existing partners and also incubate and expand the ecosystem. So that brings another element of growth to our strategy.