VMware Cloud Universal and New Customer Lifecycle Incentives Empower Partners to Optimize Profitability and Drive Multi-cloud Adoption

This week at VMworld 2021, we’re introducing new and expanded incentives dedicated to helping our partners provide services that drive customer value and partner profitability and lead customers on the path to multi-cloud. We also announced commercial transactability on the VMware Marketplace, which enables partners to reach customers, drive leads, and build net-new revenue streams from their VMware-compatible solutions.

VMware has updated its Customer Lifecycle Incentives portfolio so that the more our partners do, and the closer they are to their customers on their transformation journey, the more they earn. Our new and expanded incentives are enriched for partner-to-partner collaboration, and rewards services that drive deployment, cloud consumption, application modernization, and accelerate overall sales.

Newly enabled for the channel, Cloud Universal 3.0 helps partners accelerate customer journeys to multi-cloud. According to a Bain Cloud CIO Survey earlier this year, currently 75% of organizations working in the cloud use one or more cloud providers, but only a few multi-cloud deployments are consistent or coordinated efforts. Cloud Universal — a single, cross-platform management solution — simplifies multi-cloud complexities for partners and allows them to be agnostic in response to changing customer preferences and adaptable to customer needs. What’s more, it empowers partners to effectively capitalize on the multi-cloud revolution at scale.

Customer Lifecycle Incentives

The next evolution of VMware’s Customer Lifecycle Incentives (CLI) helps partners facilitate end-to-end digital transformation for their customers. It helps partners drive increased profitability through transforming customer’s businesses by driving key outcomes in application modernization, multi-cloud management, security, and driving employee productivity everywhere. VMware provides partner rewards and incentives throughout the customer’s journey from assessing their needs, piloting solutions through proof-of-concepts to deploying, activating, and consuming VMware services. VMware partners can also take advantage of customers’ Software-as-a-Service transformations and evolving post-sales opportunities.

New and revamped incentives include:

New Deployment Incentive – Supports the deployment of new VMware solutions without impacting current customer infrastructure; offers simplified implementation process for VMware services.
Technical Assessments & Proof of Concept now provide:
— Support for Cloud Universal and VMware Cloud on AWS/Dell
— Additional earnings for non-transacting, services only partners

“The enhancements to the Customer Lifecycle Proof of Concept incentives rewards our team for testing business requirements and use cases with our customers through our Advanced Technology Center often revealing significant customer cost saving and app migration opportunities. These enhancements reinforce VMware’s commitment to helping us drive increased profitability through expanded customer engagement.”
Scott Miller, Senior Director, Strategic Partnerships, World Wide Technology
“VMware’s Customer Lifecycle Incentives provide us with the support and tools we need to differentiate our business while supporting our customers’ Software-as-a-Service transformation. Updated Technical Assessment incentives reward us for conducting deep business and technology assessment requirements and proposing solutions that reduce our customers’ IT spend.”
Olivier de PERTAT, Président, Adlere

Partner-to-Partner Accelerator Expansion to APJ and AMER – Rewards ‘sell-through’ partners who identify opportunities and book eligible orders, handing off to the ‘orchestrate with’ partners to activate the solution and facilitate consumption of VMware services.

“Partner-to-Partner Accelerator has been a game-changer for our business by rewarding us for engaging with complementary partner organizations that enable us to deliver valuable customer solutions that are critical for our customers’ SaaS transformation.”
Giulio Morandini, CEO, R1 spa

“VMware continues to evolve their Customer Lifecycle Incentive offerings providing tremendous growth for our business as we deliver SaaS transformation and modernization for our customers. The expansion of the Partner-to-Partner accelerator incentive rewards us for teaming with partners that complement our capabilities and enable us to quickly meet the needs of our customers.”
Yoeri Langendoen, Senior Solution Specialist, SoftwareONE

Cloud Activation and Consumption Growth – Incentivizes partners that grow customer activation of VMware services across their customer portfolio.

“VMware’s continued enhancements to the Customer Lifecycle Incentives offerings, specifically around activation, are instrumental in helping us to deliver greater value by optimizing our customers’ VMware solution purchases while also driving increased profitability for our business.”
Martin Delattre, Sales Director, Metanext

The continued evolution of the CLI portfolio enables partners to be rewarded for value delivered throughout their customers’ multi-cloud transformation journeys. Incentives are mapped to customer needs before, during, and after sale – with additional rewards for partners that team up to drive even greater customer value. View this infographic and visit the incentives page to learn more.

Cloud Universal

Now partner-enabled, Cloud Universal gives partners and customers the flexibility and tools to build multi-cloud strategies that are simpler, more robust, and more efficient. Its simplified subscription model helps partners lead customers on the path to multi-cloud at their own pace, with maximum flexibility, choice, and guidance. And, with the addition of VMware Tanzu Standard, Cloud Universal unlocks application modernization efforts without having to initiate new procurement efforts or complicated billing.

Access these resources:

Success 360

Moreover, partners now play greater roles in customer success delivery with VMware Success 360, a comprehensive SKU-based offering that guides customers through all the stages of their journey. Customers need business partners that know technology well and are focused on their success. For the first time, Master Services Competency (MSC) partners can collaborate with VMware on Success 360 delivery by owning specific components within the customer success plan that match their capabilities. View these FAQs and enroll in the course today.

VMware Marketplace

The VMware Marketplace now has ‘buy and sell’ capabilities to enable customers and partners, respectively, to truly leverage the new enterprise marketplace-driven software economy. With this new capability, customers can now seamlessly purchase certified and validated partner solutions directly from the VMware Marketplace and deploy these solutions to VMware endpoints. We worked closely with three key partners (DKube, Catchpoint, and LicenseFortress) to launch our commerce capability. Read this post to learn more and access the VMware Marketplace Catalog today.

More Partner News at VMworld

Looking Ahead

At VMware, partners play a foundational role in our success and driving the industry forward. We’re excited to continue to work on providing our partners with more opportunities to leverage their unique skills and resources to deliver value across the entire customer lifecycle, especially as customer goals become more complex and change more quickly.

Thank you for your partnership.