Vmware's new channel strategy to tap India's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

With IDC's prediction of 38% year-over-year growth of India's virtual desktop infrastructure, Vmware aligns its channel strategy to leverage the prospect. Just concluding its global partner strategy where Vmware announced its channel strategy for 2014, its motto is 'value channel program'.

Surmising the key points of Vmware's new channel strategy, Ganesan Armugam, Senior Director - Partner and SMB Sales, Vmware, in an exclusive interview with The DQ Week, said, "We are bringing in performance rebate and the backend incentives for the partners for all levels akin to the value that they bring in for Vmware". Explaining the facilities partners will be getting Arumugam adds, " If we talk about solution providers in tier 2 category , they are now linked to more incentives and skills they have which is nothing but their competence as they sell more and more value added products". Earlier for partners to get any rebates or opportunity registration they had to be at enterprise level. But now VMware is starting this scheme at professional level too. Ganesan says this is a major change in the solution providers segment. As long partners have the skills of VMware and does the business for it they will get incentives.

With sales and pre-sales skills partners can move to next levels of partnerships with VMware in selling its products. Profesional partners with technical and implementation skills can move to enterprise level. Ganesan says, "We measure based on the certifications that we have. With sales and pre-sales certification one becomes partner at professional level and start doing transactions".

On the service provider's segment the focus is more on training in technology for further adoption of Vmware products. "The entire stickyness of the partner program lies in for them to do more business in terms of what skills they have and what value they bring in to our business", comments Arumugam. On enterprise level Vmware has 70 partners. It has 10 partners in premier level.

"If you look at it, this year we are clearly focusing on three areas. Software-defined-data centers, end-user computing and, hybrid cloud. In STDC we are addressing the Infrastructure-as-a-service part, where we are taking care of network and critical application virtualization", explains Arumugam.

IDC predicts that virtualized desktop adoption in India will consist of $10.38 million dollar. On its market survey on VDI in India, IDC states that, 'Windows XP coming to end of life in 2014 has many organizations across the region looking for solutions that can help them migrate to newer version of Windows while retaining access to legacy resource. CVD is an effective tool for organizations making the transition from XP to Windows 7 or 8.