VMware’s EUC portfolio has experienced rapid innovation in the last one year and has helped the company leap into leading positions across desktop, mobile and content collaboration. End User Computing (EUC) is today a large market opportunity for VMware and the company is very bullish over the EUC business in India.
In a bid to gain the top spot in the highly contested EUC market, VMware is extensively building a strong Partner ecosystem around the EUC business. To enable this, VMware has rolled out multiple channel programs to build capabilities of its partners. The VMware Partner Network is the framework for collaboration between VMware and their partners, offering a wide range of benefits, training, certifications and rewards to ensure mutual success.
In a candid interaction with Channel Times, Sundar Balasubramanian, Senior Director of General Business (Commercial Sales & Partners) at VMware sheds light on company’s relationship management strategies around the evolving EUC business in India.
What are the current trends in the End User Computing (EUC) business in India?
In the mobile cloud era, employees, devices, apps and data increasingly live beyond the physical walls of the workplace, the data center, or the network. Digital enterprises are struggling to deliver a unified digital workspace due to disjointed technology and teams.
For years, businesses have struggled to address the proliferation of mobile devices, playing defence against employees with their own devices and customers with mobile-driven expectations. CIOs very often rank mobility at the top of their list of priorities, but mobility is not just transforming business – its transfixing business. While the potential for business transformation is huge, very few companies have begun leveraging mobility to its full potential. According to the VMware survey only 17 per cent of global companies have shifted a core business process to a mobile model.
VMware’s vision is to enable organizations to achieve new levels of business process transformation. The company’s strategy aims to free businesses from more than a decade of client-server focused IT designed to enable a limited number of productivity applications and deliver a more user- and application-centric experience for the enterprise.
What kind of solutions and services have you introduced in the EUC space? What unique value proposition do you offer your customers?
We announced VMware Workspace ONE – a simple and secure enterprise platform that delivers the digital workspace, integrating identity, device management and application delivery earlier this year. By integrating identity management, real-time application delivery, and enterprise mobility management, VMware Workspace ONE engages digital employees, reduces the threat of data leakage, and modernizes traditional IT operations for the Mobile Cloud Era. By tightly integrating all these competencies, VMware helps deliver the next generation of IT delivered: one cloud, any application, on any device.
VMware is the only vendor delivering a comprehensive end-user computing platform built on a mobile-cloud architecture that enables organizations to drive digital transformation. The combination of device management, virtualization, app modernization, and identity management capabilities enables organizations to securely deliver and manage the wide variety of applications end-users want, when they want them, on the devices they choose to carry. With VMware, users can focus on the work to be done, not the technology in their hands.
How are you aligning with your enterprise channel partners such as OEMs, SIs, ISVs, TAPs, Cloud Partners, Managed partners?
We have extensive strategic partnerships with various service providers that are mutually beneficial and aim to give our customers the combined benefits of cost, efficiency and scalability.
What kind of investments are you making for building a strong channel ecosystem?
VMware’s investment strategy for EUC continues to revolve around 3 important pillars: Enable, Engage and Excite.
The first part of VMware’s investment would go into the enablement of its core partners around the EUC portfolio, from sales, pre-sales and post sales perspective. VMware delivers the same tools and content to its partners that it uses internally for its own sales and pre-sales organization.
This activity will involve a multi-city initiative focusing on partner enablement.
The second part of VMware’s investment is focused on joint go-to market initiatives along with its partners. The Joint Business Planning exercise aims at mutually agreeing to a set of demand generation activities along with partners, duly supported and funded by VMware, that eventually culminates in incremental business for VMware as well as its partners.
Our third pillar of investment is focused on rewarding partners for the successful execution of the agreed business plans and the achievement of the goals envisaged. VMware’s Solution Rewards simplifies Partner program engagement, increases a partner’s profit potential through competencies and rewards differentiation based on level of expertise within the competency.
What are the key focus areas of VMware in 2016 in terms of business expansion and relationship management?
As we move into the 2nd half of 2016, the focus now shifts to get the partner ecosystem completely aligned to our evolved end user computing strategy. This will be achieved through a series of training programs, enablement activities and hands on experience labs specifically designed for our partners.
We see tremendous growth potential across geographies as well as multiple industry verticals and our partners are our head-lights for penetrating further into these avenues. We will be engaging with our key partners to build and execute joint go to market strategies for demand generation around the EUC portfolio.
We will also be revamping our partner programs to provide a more rationalized and simpler infrastructure to our partners and ease the process of doing business with VMware.