Educating and empowering Channel

Supriya Menon,
Senior Manager, Education and Enablement – India,
VMware 

VMware follows a more holistic objective of empowering their partners with a thorough understanding of the technology and solutions’ transformative capabilities at all levels. The company does elaborate partner enablement programme to equip partners with the necessary technical expertise and help them build on their competencies. VARINDIA spoke to Supriya Menon, Senior Manager, Education and Enablement – India at VMware, to get insight into the role of education and enablement for the empowerment of channel. 

What does Education Enablement include at VMware? What are your deliverables to the organization? 

VMware specializations enable partners to make better profits by recognizing a partner’s level of expertise in selling VMware solutions into a vertical market segment. These specializations reward partners for the unique value they bring to customers in that market. Specializations are earned through experience in a specific marketplace plus successful completion of VMware training. Specializations give partners access to market-specific pricing, education, and market information, and help them drive cross-sell and upsell revenue opportunities in their area of expertise.

Besides, we also conduct many business planning meets along with sales and technical training programmes. Premier events like Partner Exchange on Tour and the Partner Leadership Summit among others help enable our partners and their teams to build their business with us.

Tell us more about your education programmes for Channel partners?

Virtualization and cloud computing are growing sectors within the IT industry in India. For a company like VMware that operates through a 100% channel network, it becomes extremely critical to ensure that the partners are not only abreast of the latest products from VMware, but also possess the required knowledge to be able to offer assistance to the customers whether with the purchase decision or during after-sales support. 

The training and knowledge sharing assumes special significance in a market like India as virtualization is still at a very nascent stage. Educating partners that how IT is now a critical component to an overall IT strategy and the significance of choosing the right vendor is critical to the business growth. 

To achieve this objective, we regularly invest in several education programmes for channel partners to help them achieve their objectives better. VMware has initiated several industry-recognized certification training programmes which allow partners to get access to the highest quality training and education and build customer confidence.

VMware certifications are not just aimed at training individuals to design, install or manage IT. As partners deepen their VMware expertise, it is a win-win situation for partners as well as customers.

How is your partners’ reception to the education programmes?

As per the third annual VMware Cloud Index, 62% of the Indian organizations are increasing their budgets for training internal IT staff to support their cloud initiatives. What is even more critical is that nearly 76% of the Indian IT professionals believe they risk falling behind their peers professionally if they do not improve their cloud-related skills and gain cloud project experience

Hence, there is a very inherent need for educating partners on these programmes. VMware has always been at the forefront assisting companies to realize the business benefits of virtualization in India. We are committed to enabling our technology to be managed by well-prepared staff by expanding the reach of our training programmes.

Our education programmes have been very well-received by the channel partners. VMware has 13 training partners in India to meet the rising demand for training in virtualization and cloud computing technologies in India. 

As members of the VMware partner network, VATCs gain increased value and visibility as authorized educators for VMware products, solutions and services. VATCs in India include RCV Innovations, Dimension Data India, EMC, GT Enterprises, HP, Infocloud Technologies India, Koenig Solutions, Mercury Solutions NIIT, Quint Wellington Redwood India Consulting, Rooman Technologies, and Venus Technology Park.

What is your training process?

We have our programmes uniquely designed to provide the bleeding edge thinking and advanced know-how to employ IT as a strategic business enabler and impart all skills needed to create, operate and maintain an IT environment that flexes and adapts as per the ever-evolving IT environment.

To accelerate their learnings, individuals can simply choose the level that reflects their current status and move forward from there. They simply need to choose their current level of certification – professional, advanced professional or expert and the solution track they want to study, data center virtualization, cloud, end-user computing or cloud application platform. Once they have successfully obtained the certification, they can move on to the next level.

For a business, this translates into less time away from the job; for an individual it means faster career progression.

We have recently enhanced the VMware certification with new programmes that make it easier and faster to acquire exceptional skills. Role-based training ensures both theory and practical skills are aligned to real-world responsibilities.

Also, our training programmes are very comprehensive and do not require constant mentoring. 

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