partners are our extended arms to help us drive "customer for life" philosophy

Manish Alshi
Director – Channels & Alliances, VMware India

Need of a Partner Programme 
At VMware, we deeply appreciate and recognize the importance of working together with our esteemed partners, to serve our customers better. The Partner ecosystem has been an integral part of our growth story & continues to give us much required strategic leverage, to pursue our vision and deliver new solutions to our customers. Our partners are our extended arms that help us drive our “customer for life” philosophy. A robust partner program is an absolute necessity, not just to encourage and incentivise partners, but to provide them a framework to plan their investments & go to market strategy in this long standing relationship.  

Importance of a Partner Programme 
The Partner Connect program delivers simplified engagement with VMware. It is built on three key elements:
•    How we enable, engage & incentivize our partners to identify their customer’s strategic IT priorities & map it back to our solution platforms
•    Extend the success of our Master Services Competencies, which validates and rewards partners who have high levels of service delivery capability
•    Eliminate silos across our partners’ most common business models: resell, professional services, cloud hosting and managed services

Main Concerns to Address 
VMware Partner Connect reimagines the way we do business with our partners. It is designed to deliver simplicity, choice and innovation to our partners, in their overall engagement with VMware.
One of the key considerations is that the program should support the business economics for our partners, so that they are not only able to sustain their VMware business practice, but also make it consistently profitable. In addition, the program rewards partners for growing their VMware business, achieving competencies and progressing to higher partnership tiers, thereby acknowledging incremental investments in their VMware business portfolio.