There are many decisions that will need to be made by VMware partners of many shapes and sizes following release of the termination notice issued by Broadcom on Dec. 22; key among them will be finding new business opportunities.
One such opportunity occurred last week, when Boston-based Leostream, a remote desktop access platform provider, launched a new initiative targeted at partners whose business revolves around VMware Horizon, a platform for secure delivery of virtual desktops and apps across the hybrid cloud.
According to a release, the V-Partner Continuity Program “offers new incentives for solution providers, managed service providers, and other technology resellers terminated by Broadcom, along with specific tools and training to serve customers whose Horizon licenses are expiring.
“Leostream V-Partners gain a wide range of benefits that help build their businesses, increase revenues, and provide their customers with the best possible experience.”
The Leostream platform, the release went on to say, integrates with any hypervisor, any hardware, any on-premises or cloud resource, any end user device, and any major remote display protocol: “After end users are moved to Leostream, partners can make changes to the underlying infrastructure non-disruptively as customer needs evolve. This allows organizations to continue using vSphere as long as needed, and then integrate different hypervisors, clouds or hyperconvergence platforms in the future.”
Randy Foster, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing, said the program assures service and loyalty to those partners whose customers rely on VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), DaaS (desktop as-a-service), and other hosted desktop technologies to support hybrid and remote workforces.
“Former VMware partners will find that with the unique remote access workflows the Leostream Platform facilitates, its management simplicity, security, BYOD flexibility, and low cost of ownership, the VMware problem has become a major opportunity.”
The release notes that soon V-Partners will be able to access, among other things, sales and marketing materials, and training courses from the Leostream partner portal.
Karen Gondoly, the company’s chief executive officer (CEO) and vice president of project management, in an interview with Channel Daily News, said the move is a “good one as the firm has been a VMware technology alliance partner and helped various organizations with VDI on VMware since first forming 20 years ago.”
She added that “over the years, we’ve expanded our platform, you can imagine, quite a lot. What we’ve become is really a fully vendor-independent remote access platform that can work across on-prem and cloud for just about any kind of end user computing type of workloads that you can imagine.”
Plans for the V-Partner Continuity Program began in earnest last year, said Gondoly, when there was no communication at all from Broadcom about its plans for the End User Computing (EUC) division, once the sale was finalized.
“If you don’t hear anything, it probably means it is not going to go well,” she said. “For us, that meant there is going to be an opportunity, because they are not making plans for this.”
Confirmation of that indeed being the case came on Dec. 7, when Broadcom announced its intention to divest both the EUC division and the Carbon Black security software unit.
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan released the news during a Q4 2023 earnings call and, according to an advisory issued by Forrester the following day, the announcement “comes just 11 days after Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware on November 26, a quick turnaround that suggests that the move to spin off these two business units has likely been in the works for some time.
“Up to this point, the fate of VMware’s EUC and Carbon Black business has been mysteriously absent from Broadcom communications, a fact that led Forrester to predict that this spin-off would happen.
“VMware’s EUC business comprises Horizon for client virtualization, App Volumes for application delivery, and Workspace ONE for device management and digital employee experience. The Carbon Black product is an endpoint security product focused on endpoint prevention, detection and response, and extended detection and response. Forrester’s consensus is that this divestiture is likely good for customers and both businesses.”
