I attended my first VMworld two years ago in Las Vegas, at The Venetian. With the focus on enterprise end users, it was only by fluke that I noticed a channel breakout happening across the street at the Wynn, and braved the desert heat to make it over in time for the partner keynote.
At the keynote, then VMware co-president introduced the company’s first-ever channel chief, Scott Aronson. An internal hire and VMware veteran without a great deal of channel experience, Aronson took on the newly-created role of senior vice-president, global channels and alliances. While the vendor wasn’t new to the channel by any means – 85 per cent of its revenue today is indirect, so they’re clearly doing something right — one did get the sense they were starting from scratch in some regards. The talk was on simplification, on bringing together all the assets of a fragmented channel program into one group, streamlining contracts and investing in education.
Two years later, Aronson is gone – he’s now running worldwide field operations at Pivotal – and at this year’s VMworld partner keynote and my conversations with executives, I got the sense that, in many regards, VMware is starting over once again.
Part of that may be driven by a recent influx of experienced channel executives into VMware’s channel leadership ranks. At the top is Dave O’Callaghan, who came onboard in May as the new global channel chief. He spent years in senior channel positions at Cisco Systems, a vendor that knows what it’s doing in the channel. Other recent hires to the channel team include HP-veteran Frank Rauch as Americas channel chief, Toni Adams from Symantec to run global partner and alliance marketing, and Andy Banks, late of Cisco and Comstor, to run global distribution.
The messaging about program overhaul was similar to what I heard in 2011, but this time, I have more of a sense that they mean it, and have the team to back it up. New rules of engagement were released, which is always an important starting-point. Deal registration is getting faster. VMworld’s enablement team will work more closely with partners for one seamless selling motion.
That’s all tweaking, though. O’Callaghan and the other executives indicated a much wider overhaul is coming. Programs are too disparate and siloed by partner type (again, shades of 2011). There must be more commonality, from program tiers to support, while still letting partners differentiate and recognize that different kinds of partners have different needs. Consistency, profitability and predictability seems to be their mantra. Value, not volume, and so forth.
Beyond that though, they couldn’t go into too much detail. I get the sense that the changes are still in flux, and aren’t yet fully baked. This could be good for partners – get in touch with VMware and make your wishes for what the new program should look like known now.
It seems like much the same challenge VMware laid out two years ago. Hopefully its new team will be able to pull it off. We’ll see in February, at Partner Exchange.