During its Partner Exchange event in Las Vegas last week, VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) pushed its partners to find new customers in the small and medium sized business (SMB) segment, announcing a new SMB specialization and incentives to tap into the growing market.
Related story: Seven signs VMware is doubling down its bet on SMB
In this video, Colleen Kapase, VMware’s senior director of partner solutions, explains how the vendor will take on competition with Microsoft Corp., whose Hyper-V product competes with VMware’s vSphere suite.
In 2011, VMware also published several blogs “setting the record straight” on what it said were inaccurate claims that its products were inferior to Microsoft’s own.
Service provider relationships
VMware also put emphasis on the importance of service providers to its growth and encouraged its solution partners to seek strategic alliances with service providers during its event.
The company hosted a networking event for service providers to meet with solution providers and discuss what their relationships could look like, Kapase said. “We’ve seen these two communities be hesitant about what that relationship should look like.”
VMware showed those partners three examples of how that relationship could work, from a “date,” to an engagement and finally a long-term marriage of companies.
In 2011, the company saw 200 per cent growth through its service provider program. VMware currently has about 1500 service provider partners worldwide, with AT&T most recently jumping on board and Ingram Micro announcing it had been authorized as a VMware Service Provider Program aggregator.
“I think we’re one of the few companies that can bridge the gap between the old world and the new world of IT service delivery,” Carl Eschenbach, VMware’s co-president of customer operations told an audience of partners during the event. “VMware’s not naive and we understand that we can’t do this on our own.”
“VMware is focused on delivering services to a very small segment of the market,” he added. “We are not hoarding services for ourselves.”