VMware has made enhancements to its VIP Partner Program to help accelerate its worldwide partner sales and growth this year.
Julie Eades, director of worldwide partner marketing at VMware, said the changes to the VIP Partner Program were made to accommodate and benefit VMware’s nearly 10,000 channel partners across the globe. The updates to the program focus on three main areas, Eades said. They include, enhancements made to the advantage + incentive program, improvements to VMware’s partner training path and the addition of new sales and marketing tools.
“Over 75 per cent of our revenue is derived from the channel,” Eades said. “We’re committed to the channel and we think they’ll enjoy these enhancements that we’ve added to the program.”
Previously, Eades said VMware’s Professional level partners did not have access to the advantage + incentive program. With today’s enhancements, Eades said these partners can now benefit by getting their foot in the door and obtaining various rewards.
Margin enhancements have also been made with the advantage + incentive program and this time around, Eades said, partners can now receive an up-front discount in addition to a back-end rebate as well. VIP partners, Eades says, can receive up to 16 per cent margins based on what their current working relationship with their customer is, whether it be with existing customers, new customers, or customers they may have had an influence on but who have lost the sale to another partner. This is what VMware refers to as the Influence + program, which used to only be available for Premier partners, but is now also open to VMware Enterprise partners as well as Global SIs.
“Partners can receive really rich rewards thanks to these new enhancements and we want to encourage all of our partners to register their deals,” Eades said.
Asides from margin opportunity enhancements, Eades also said updates have been made on the VMware partner training front as well.
“We have the essential series which gives partners baseline information, the business builder series, which is more of a deep dive technical know-how training resource, face to face trainings and continuing education which includes cheat sheets and product whitepapers,” Eades said. “Through the partner portal, partners can also take a free online self-paced training course to help get them up to speed on VMware products.
While Eades could not say how many of the 10,000 channel partners come specifically from Canada, she quotes that over 3,800 partners are from the Americas.
“Canada’s an important market for us and we will be continuously recruiting partners,” Eades said. “We want partners who not only understand how to work with virtualization, but we also want partners who can sell it quickly. The SMB space in particular is a growing area for us,” she added.
With respect to Canada, Eades says so far there has been a tremendous amount of interest with desktop virtualization products and she says partners are now finding it’s even easier to tackle customer opportunities because of VMware’s broad range of product offerings.
“Partners are finding they can go to their current customers and have a dialogue with them about other different pain points they may be having,” Eades said.
“Partners are addressing these needs with the VMware product portfolio and I encourage them to take advantage of our new program enhancements.”