VMware offers incentives, specializations for channel partners

Last week, VMware welcomed a record number of resellers, integrators, and business partners to the VMware Partners Exchange (PEX) 2012 conference in Las Vegas, where an impressive 4,300 people made the journey to hear what the virtualization giant had to say. With so many partners gathered together in one place, VMware took the opportunity to unveil new programs, solution competencies, and rewards designed to help those very partners prepare for the arrival of the cloud era while simplifying the experience of doing business with VMware.

While the keynote from Scott Aronson, VMware’s senior vice president of global channels and alliances, didn’t make any specific mention of new products or services, it did attempt to inspire the channel and provide a vision as to what was to come in 2012.

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Aronson recapped the company’s successful 2011 year findings, stating that it took in $3.77 billion in revenue for 2011, an increase of 32 percent from 2010; achieved 350,000 customers with the help of its 50,000 partners; had 32 percent growth year over year, with 85 percent of sales coming from VMware partners; and noted that 95 percent of enterprise data centers have at least one instance of a VMware software product, while small businesses remained somewhere between 20 percent to 30 percent virtualized.

If those numbers don’t seem impressive on their own, consider the fact that analysts are projecting that the global private cloud market will reach a whopping $41.5 billion by 2015. VMware intends to own the lion’s share of that market over the next three years. To help them achieve that goal, VMware is going to be looking to its partner channel.

VMware is asking partners to broaden the scope of their traditional areas of technological expertise. For doing so, VMware will offer a variety of new incentives to those partners that make the investment.

Aronson said that at a time when other technology companies are pulling money out of the channel, VMware is doubling down. But in doing so, VMware is asking partners to double down as well.

VMware is now requiring its premier and enterprise-level partners to invest in at least two solution competencies within the next year. To back up this request, the virtualization giant argues that research shows the investment is well worth it, since partners with at least one solution competency currently sellson average 3.5 times more than those without a competency.

With that in mind, VMware introduced the following three new solution competencies to its partners:

The first is Virtualization of Business-Critical Applications (VBCA), designed by VMware to enable partners to provide guidance and solutions to help customers virtualize mission-critical applications such as Exchange, SQL, Oracle, or SAP. The new competency recognizes the extra challenges and efforts that are required to move a tier-one application into a virtualized or cloud environment. But this ability will help further differentiate one partner from another that doesn’t yet also have this competency.

The second is infrastructure as a service (IaaS), a new competency designed to accelerate partner delivery of and extend expertise in VMware hybrid cloud solutions and services. VMware is making a huge push into the growing public and hybrid cloud markets, and it will need channel partners to help it expand within those markets.

The third competency is Management, and it is designed by VMware to enable and reward partners that help customers simplify and automate the operations of virtual and cloud environments with the VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite.

The VBCA and IaaS competencies are both currently available, but VMware said the Management competency wouldn’t be made available until sometime later this quarter. These three new competencies will join VMware’s existing set, which includes Infrastructure Virtualization, Business Continuity, and Desktop Virtualization.

Enhancements made to VMware’s advantage+ and Solution Rewards incentive programs give partners the ability to double their existing incentives in 2012. VMware added that when partners register deals through advantage+ for net-new VMware customers, they will also be eligible for a new back-end bonus rebate. With the new Solution Rewards, partners with solution competencies will be eligible for a first-time sale bonus rebate when they sell a new solution outside the Infrastructure Virtualization solution competency to an existing customer for the first time.

Smaller partners may have a tougher time branching out in solution competencies. However, VMware, now more than ever before, realizes the importance of the small-business market for expanding the company’s long-term revenue.

Because of that, VMware is also offering new tools and incentives designed to help speed the delivery of solutions for small businesses. These enhanced programs provide new demand creation tools, customer offers, on-demand access to free training videos, and increased incentives for small business-related sales — all designed to enhance partner expertise in and delivery of small business solutions.

VMware also recently launched Solutions Exchange, a partner-to-partner and customer-to-partner online collaboration tool that can help smaller partners find the missing skills needed to help them close more deals.

Are you a partner? What do you think of the new competencies and requirements?

This article, “VMware offers incentives, specializations for channel partners,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.