At this week’s VMware Explore customer and partner conference in Las Vegas, IT Europa sat down with Tracy-Ann Palmer, the company’s vice president for partner experience, programmes and distribution, to find out the latest state of play for the company’s channel.
The company made a big pivot towards signing up managed service providers a few years ago, as its cloud and as-a-service business for its infrastructure solutions quickly expanded.
When Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware eventually goes through, VMware is expected to form a multi-cloud infrastructure services unit within Broadcom. And Palmer is keen for partners to take full advantage of the newer services that will come on stream as a result of that, whether its helping customers to combine the management of different data workloads in different clouds, edge service connectivity, or artificial intelligence-based data processing and management.
“Many customers still don’t have multi-cloud strategies for whatever reason, and despite the benefits that come from such strategies. It is up to our partners to make sure customers realise the benefits and help them integrate different clouds, and help them manage the different workloads,” said Palmer (pictured).
She says a multi-cloud strategy helps customers avoid cloud lock-ins with a single provider and helps to cut costs. “Amazon Web Services is not going to tell its customers about the benefits of multi-cloud and they are not going to push other cloud providers either, so it’s up to our partners to do it.”
As part of this, said Palmer, partners will be there at both pre-sale and post-sale to demonstrate and address compliance needs, automation, cost optimisation, value-add, the benefits of AI, and driving up outcomes, among other areas.
“The market is evolving and customers are under pressure from their stakeholders to optimise their assets and transform, and this is when our partners can come in and help manage the process,” Palmer said.
The company made some changes to its Partner Connect Program this March, to help partners move in this direction, and Palmer said she expected the programme to evolve further going forward.
