VMware is about to conclude its Partner Exchange 2013 (PEX) conference in five cities of India. The broader message given to partners is to broaden the scope of their traditional areas of technology expertise. The company is also offering a variety of new incentives. Moreover, to make its partners' sales and technical team more robust the company has introduced new enablement tools.
This year, VMware is steeping up its focus on the SMB partner specialization as part of a broader effort to step up its investment in the SMB space. While VMware has a presence in both SMB and mid-market, it is not as well developed as its enterprise business, and so this is where partners are being encouraged to brush up on their skills. Training, partner enablement and demand generation are included in this effort.
Talking about VMware's vision and technology roadmap for 2013, Ganesan Arumugam, director, partner channels, VMware on the sideline of PEX conference held in Delhi said, We have set our priorities for our partners. This year we will be focusing on areas like software defined datacenter, end user computing platforms and hybrid cloud. These are global priorities we have spelled out to our Indian partners. Another focus area is to tap opportunity in the SMBs space. Currently, India has 15% of server virtualization. We have to address this untapped opportunity in much organized way. We are rolling out our programs, which are centered around and would attract our partners.
In India, only 15% of servers are being virtualized. Our partners look at it as great potential not only selling VMware products because with every dollar of VMware, our partners can generate additional $8-10 margins by selling servers, storage, networking, security and implementation and services. Our partners always lead the virtual story to their customers,†pointed out Arumugam.
Commenting on the slow adoption of virtualization, Arumugam added, The reason of slow adoption of server virtualization is the customers take long time to change its existing IT infrastructures. Customer wait for an event to happen, when the application needs up-gradation or when they have to make additional investment in the existing IT infrastructures they always look for cost effective or better solutions like cloud and infrastructures. This is why India has only 15% adoption of server virtualization. We believe there is more scope to grow. This is the process or phase every country has gone through. Customers who are undergoing virtualization, first start off with non critical applications, business critical applications they do not touch. Having said that, today most of our customers have upgraded from phase one to next level and started doing virtualization of SAP, banking application, and other critical apps.
For VMware, channel training and certification is most important. The company provides various sales, pre-sales and technical programs other than online training, it also offer hands-on training courses. It has more than 10 educational partners like NIIT, VNS technologies, GT enterprises, etc. In the existing sales program, it has incorporated role-based certification program. Under this program a sale person of the partner wants to get expertise on one focus area like desktop virtualization, cloud, DR, with in sales certification, it has made sub category on solutions partner wants to focus.
Additionally, it has launched sales bytes for partners. It is a 15 minutes video bulletin which a partner can talk to its customer along with white papers on virtualization, follow up EDM and mailers. Other additions are partner ready campaign and mobile applications, for getting latest promotions and schemes.