Since Partners play a significant role in the space, VMWare works closely with them to help their customers in their Multi Cloud and App Modernization journey.
As the year 2022 draws to a sluggish close, it’s time to look back and take stock of the channel performance of leading vendors and distributors and the key achievements and take-aways from the Channel Market. Starting from the widening market opportunities to a somewhat visible respite from the raving pandemic, from being the year of Europe’s greatest war since World War II that pushed the pandemic battered global economy and the European markets into recession to a year of greater cybersecurity concerns, 2022 has seen it all.
In a series of interactions with the poster-boys of Indian IT, SME Channels attempts to understand how leading vendors have fared in the year goneby; what drives their growth engine; the key milestones achieved from channel perspective; direction for channel partners and their growth blueprint for 2023.
[quote font=”tahoma” font_size=”13″ font_style=”italic” color=”#262626″ bgcolor=”#f9f9f9″]
“As we see expansion in our product portfolio and customer base, there has been a significant expansion of our partner ecosystem in tier II and tier III markets.”
Mohit Arora,
Sr. Director, Commercial and Govt. Business,
VMware
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We spoke to cloud major VMWare to get a sneak peek into its performance in the channel market. The company has been enabling its customers transition from ‘Cloud Chaos to Cloud Smart’ and accelerate their pace of innovation by turning multi-cloud complexity into a competitive advantage. As Indian enterprises get more focussed on delivering world-class experiences for their end customers, VMWare senses a huge interest in modern applications services and microservices. VMware’s innovative products and solutions and expanded partnerships have helped customers across industries by modernizing their IT operations with cloud-native applications, migrating apps to any cloud and accelerating the delivery of new cloud-native apps.
Additionally, VMware’s solutions have helped streamline management to establish consistent operations across data centers, edge environments and the cloud.
In an exclusive chat with SME Channels, Mohit Arora, Sr. Director, Commercial and Govt. Business, VMware, shares his company’s key channel achievements and seminal vision for the Partner Ecosystem. Edited Excerpts:
As a company – how has VMWare performed in 2022 in the Indian Channel Market?
100% of our sales are through channels. We work with all tiers of ecosystem partners, from global System Integrators to large, tiered resellers and system integrators depending on the kind of opportunity and location where we serve the customer. VMware also works with its OEM alliances, with companies like HP, Dell, Lenovo, Hitachi, etc.
In August 2022, we launched an upgraded VMware Partner Connect program that provides a flexible framework to support partners’ go-to-market with VMware, accelerate partner growth, and reward partners for the totality of their achievements and capabilities.
What are the major technologies that you have provided to Channel to leverage the market opportunity?
Our SDDC portfolio is completely driven through our Channel partners, which includes solutions for the virtualization or hyper-converged infrastructure for storage and our network and security solutions under our NSX portfolio. Besides, we have established partners across the country for solutions like the end-user computing portfolio, which includes Workspace ONE and Horizon. Additionally, a significant amount of business happens independently through the channel partners in the SMB space.
How many net new partners have you added this year? Which are the major names?
As we see expansion in our product portfolio and customer base, there has been a significant expansion of our partner ecosystem in tier II and tier III markets. With the rise in demand for digital technologies in the public sector, we have significantly scaled our partnership with the local partners who help us fulfill these requirements. Overall, we have seen a significant increase in the number of partners and the transactions that we have been able to execute in the last year.
What is your revenue growth expectation for this year?
While we can’t divulge revenue growth, we would like to share that globally our revenue for the third quarter was $3.21 billion, an increase of 1% from the third quarter of fiscal 2022. The results met our expectations and demonstrated that our innovation engine is flourishing, as we unveiled many new offerings across our portfolio, including VMware vSphere 8, VMware vSAN 8 and VMware Aria.
What are other milestones you achieved last year from a channel perspective?
While we can’t divulge specific milestones achieved we can for sure that we have seen growth in the number of partners transcting with VMware India. In addition to this we have made significant progress in the multi-cloud and Tanzu space with our specialized partners and have been able to unearth and win some large and strategic opportunities for VMware in the App modernization space.
Multi-Cloud and App modernization are at the core of VMware go to market strategies across the globe, Partners play a significant role in this space and we are working closely with all our partners in enabling them to help their customers in their journey of Multi Cloud and App Modernization.
What is your road map for 2023?
For the year ahead, VMware will continue to focus on executing our multi-cloud strategy and helping enterprises in their pursuit of becoming cloud-smart, modernizing applications, and offering anywhere workplace solutions to our customers.
What is your direction for channel partners for next year?
Our channel partners are spread across the length and breadth of the country, and we look to our channel partners to help us solve and address the business problems that are being faced by our customers. We conduct regular sessions so our partners have a deep understanding of our technology stack, like modern apps, UEM, and multi-cloud management, to ensure that they can play an advisory role for our customers.
We are also now making the VMware Ignite program more broadly available to partners and this is aligned with the Go-To-Market Play System and partner-led services initiatives. The program is a unique partner practice activation and development activity featuring a rigorous, proven methodology providing structured development paths to build capabilities a across technical, sales, services, and marketing functions.
