After a long hiatus, it was great to catch up with so many of you again in Barcelona. VMware Explore was everything it promised to be – and more. A big thank you to all of you who made the trip. We hope you found it as exciting and engaging as we did!
We’re continuing to evolve and challenge the status quo for enterprise IT, and you – our trusted partners – play an integral part in that journey. We want you to work and innovate alongside us, and consistently pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in your journeys to continued profitability and growth.
In Barcelona, we outlined four ways we want to help you do this:
Enhancing our new partner connect program and experience
Our ecosystem is constantly evolving, and the way customers buy and partners sell has changed substantially over the last few years. So we’re remodelling our partner connect programme to give you the flexibility required to drive lifecycle profit – as well as customer stickiness – in the age of subscription.
In Partner Connect 2.0 we’re creating a single, unified, global program that rewards partners throughout the value chain based on a flexible point system. It’s been specifically calibrated to help you cultivate your team’s skills and capabilities whatever your VMware footprint, business model and route to market, so you can shape your own journey with us.
Launching in February, the new program will incentivise partners both for developing their capabilities and excelling in their performance, as they engage and support the customer lifecycle and priorities. So stay tuned to hear more very soon.
Aligning partner and customer priorities through VMware’s Go-To-Market Play System (GPS)
Many of our joint customers encounter complexity at every turn – from complex silos of toolsets and teams across their cloud platforms, to a convoluted cloud infrastructure and a fragmented app access experience. We want to empower you with the right tools to combat this complexity, and help your customers scale their cloud-native platform applications, accelerate their enterprise cloud transformations and empower and secure their hybrid workforces.
That’s why we’ve reframed our Go-To-Market Play System (GPS) so it’s more centred around customer outcomes, and not our product pitches. Our series of plays are tailored to the challenges of modern IT, and designed to create consistent routes to market that help you drive pipeline, win and complete projects, and deliver customer success. Our GPS plays are each representing a sales motion with all the relevant resources behind the joint goal of ensuring customer success. That’s why our GPS plays now offer best practices and tools for marketing and demand generation, as well as sales and technical enablement. All of which is combined with an array of incentives, and recommendations for how to tap into the partner development fund.
The feedback in Barcelona on these changes was hugely positive, and partners adopting our GPS are already closing nearly twice as many customer opportunities as their peers. So if you’re looking to revise your business model to align with changing patterns of technology consumption, then make sure to connect with us.
Capitalising on the Tanzu opportunity
App modernisation is now an undisputed priority for companies across sectors, but it’s clear customers need guidance from partners to truly unlock the potential value of modern apps. Many businesses are too invested in legacy apps to change, and face multiple roadblocks when scaling their IT infrastructure and matching the best platform to each app.
Partners can offer end-to-end support here – from agile and secure development to optimising and managing the platform lifecycle, all the while breaking any silos that exist between developer, security and operations teams. It’s a crucial part of our collective mission to create customer-for-life value across every step of the journey. At VMware Explore we saw huge enthusiasm for the opportunities for profitability that exist in the Tanzu portfolio, as partners look to grow customer accounts.
Unlocking on-prem workloads with vSphere+
Thousands of customers continue to run workloads on premise for a multitude of reasons, including security or data sovereignty concerns, or a preference for more guaranteed performance, latency or cost predictability. That’s why we’re introducing vSphere+™, to bring the benefits of cloud to on-premises workloads. It combines industry-leading virtualization technology, an enterprise-ready Kubernetes environment, and high-value cloud services to create SaaS-enabled infrastructure which is available on a subscription basis.
It’s a product that we’re super excited about, and you should be too. Our partners on the ground in Barcelona certainly were, with our ‘introduction to vSphere+ session one of the most oversubscribed of the event.
Those who attended heard how it promises to meet customers’ need for unparalleled freedom, agility and flexibility by taking a new approach to cloud services, while also allowing you to pivot your business model towards subscription. All of which means you can continue to deliver exceptional consultancy and innovation to your customers, and simultaneously grow your own business through services-led opportunities.
These are just some of the many innovations we discussed – all of which are designed to arm you with more tools, tips and tricks to engage your customers with renewed vigour and energy.
We want to hear about all of the great work you are doing out in the field, so don’t forget to submit your entries for the 2023 VMware Partner Achievement Awards. It’s your chance to be recognised as a trusted partner for your achievements and outstanding accomplishments and increase your visibility as a leading VMware partner. So apply now to avoid missing out!
