VMware – A Partner-focused company

In a chat with VARINDIA, Sharat Sinha, Vice-President, Commercial Business and Partners, VMware APJ, discusses about the company’s distribution network, the role of channel partners in positioning VMware, value addition by the partners, etc

Please brief us about the VMware’s distribution network in the country at present?

Most of our business is conducted through partners. VMware is very much a partner-focused company. In APAC, we transact more than 95% of our business through partners. Other than a few customers in Canberra in Australia, pretty much 100% business is done through partners. It is a very much partner-driven company. With our 60% to 80% market share in the hypervisor space, we have a very complex network of partners. In APAC alone, we have more than 20,000 partners and execute a significant number of transactions every quarter. It is a big network and a significant part goes to distribution. We have a 2 tier model which goes to the distributors and we have three distributors in the country. It’s very well distributed, but apart from that we also have OEM partnerships which allow us to go-to-market. We also have VCPP (VMware Cloud Provider Program) partners who offer us a service. So there are service providers who offer business as well. And we have system integrators since system outsource is a fairly well-distributed model, but in the traditional sense of distribution there are three distributors in the country.

What is VMware doing for developing and expanding the partnership base, what kind of initiatives?

We have more than 93,000 customers in the APAC region. In order to reach out to them, we have a primary go-to-market approach through partners. On the one hand, we make significant efforts for enabling the partners both in terms of understanding the technology and positioning the technology. We also help them in doing the right certifications in those areas and we also do sales training for them and apart from that we also send them for deployment so that they can do world-class deployment work for our customers. So there are a host of services that are done to enable and help them to be ready for deployment.

So how instrumental has been the role of the channel in positioning VMware as a leading brand in the country today?
 

We do our own branding exercise through events like VMworld, which is an industry-wide event, very well known globally. We do vForum across multiple cities in Asia Pacific and across multiple cities in India as well. Apart from that, we do Partner Leadership Forum, we do CIO Summit, where we reach out to end-customers. So through these we create a lot of demand for it and all this is fulfilled through partners. We create demand which is ultimately either closed through partners or sometimes partners reach out to customers and come back to us. That is how it works.

What kind of value does the partner add to your partners again to their functioning and their productivity?

As a starting point, partners have their own business. So we have created a profitable model for predictable profitability. They know when they are getting a deal, how much money they can make. Secondly, through branding, joint marketing demand generation, we create enough leads for partners so that they can work on to get business done. We also transfer our intellectual property, when it comes to knowledge about technology. It is a combination of all these things that we do for our partners, so that our partners are fully enabled to be successful in the market.

What will be the evolution path for VMware, partners in future in terms of the ecosystem that you have at present? What will be the evolution going ahead?

VMware is driven by technology innovation and we have expanded our product portfolio significantly in the last 3-4 years. So, we provide full software-defined stack and along with that we have workspace One which is in the end-user-computing area, involving desktop virtualization and enterprise mobility management. It’s a very wide stack multi product and solution that we have. So the future revolution is around partners to sell the entire stack and get some significant growth through this, which essentially means any partner doing business with VMware is going to grow faster than the market. They are going to gain market share, they are going to grow double, quadruple in their business. So that itself requires ability to scale both in terms of business capability and everything else. That is how I foresee partners evolving. We also foresee the fact that our technology is utilized by our customers for digital transformation. So it’s important that partners who work with us are able to articulate that value proposition. They are also able to understand customer’s strategic direction so that they can be a part of the digital transformation journey. The customers and partners with us jointly can make that possible.