As Partner Exchange was winding down in Las Vegas, we ended on a high note with our first vSAN Partner Awards Ceremony on Sunday evening – August 27th. Over 100 guests joined us for the over-subscribed event at the Mandalay Bay Hotel to recognize our leading Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) partners across the Americas. Michael Dell personally handed out the awards, and was joined by Lee Caswell, Chad Sakac, Kevin Scannell, and Frank Rauch.
HCI is one of the fastest growing markets in the industry and we’re seeing vSAN adoption across 100% of industry verticals with more than 60% of our customers using it for business-critical applications. We could not be more excited about this momentum and many of our partners are jumping in with both feet.
This year, the winners in each region/segment were:
FusionStorm – West
Presidio – East
WWT – Central
Turning Point – Canada
Service IT – Latin America
Sirius – Public Sector
Blue Line Service – “Rising Star”
And (drum roll please), CDW for Partner of the Year
As with any new technology, customers need support, training and encouragement to adopt HCI, and the partner community is best-positioned to deliver this assistance. Our winning partners have recorded HCI revenue growth rates in the triple digits in the Americas for both vSAN and Dell EMC VxRail. vSAN and HCI are the new bright selling tools fueling growth and partner investment in enablement, technical & sales training and execution are paying off, and they’re leading the charge in storage transformation. It’s an obvious win-win-win for VMware, our partners, and our joint customers.
Speaking of training, VxRail and vSAN Test Drives were a huge success in Q2 FY’18 and we are extending the test drives into the partner community this quarter. Partners will now have dedicated classes and hands-on labs for end-customers at their own partner facilities. Both partners and customers will benefit from increased knowledge and experience with hyper-converged infrastructure, which will further accelerate adoption of vSAN-based HCI (any more acceleration of vSAN adoption and we’ll probably get a speeding ticket!)
Congratulations again to all our winning Channel Partners! This is an exciting time to be in hyper-convergence! If you did not make it to Las Vegas for VMworld, don’t despair…VMworld Europe is here, and in Barcelona the historic sites are actually…well….historic! So book now and catch much of the vSAN and VxRail content presented in Vegas.
