Raghuram Krishnan
Director, Channels and Partner Sales, VMware India

The evolving role of CMOs 
VMware is uniquely positioned to meet its customers where they are and support them in their cloud journey. As part of its Cloud-Smart Ecosystem strategy, VMware is committed to levelling up the partner experience, making it easier and more profitable for partners to thrive in the role of trusted advisors. The company has also launched a Customer Success Competency in January this year, which is around enabling and eventually incentivizing customers to build that practice capability with the customer. 

Besides, VMware has introduced the Partner 2 Partner (P2P) program where two or more partners can avail services from each other and deliver solutions around niche and complex technologies like Virtual Cloud Network, Modern EndPoint Management, App Modernization and Cloud Automation, thereby building and enhancing customer experience.

Contribution towards strategic business discussions
Intrinsic security represents VMware’s vision to disrupt cybersecurity by embedding unified visibility and control into every aspect of an enterprise’s infrastructure - network, workload, cloud, workspace/ endpoint and identity. Regardless of industry or geographic location, every enterprise has had to reckon with the challenges of a siloed, threat-centric and bolted-on security approach. Rather than seeing these risks in context and addressing them holistically, most enterprises and the security vendors have taken a vector-by-vector approach.
A new approach is definitely required. With VMware’s intrinsic security approach, deep monitoring and behavioral analysis are implemented at each control point, and then unified for full contextual awareness. Intrinsic security enables comprehensive contextual awareness, besides combining multiple prevention capabilities such as machine learning, or signatures or behavioral analysis. With clear and comprehensive insight into what’s happening on every endpoint, VMware’s approach enables it to respond faster and with more precision than ever before. 

To drive sustainable growth
From a customer standpoint, time to value, and value delivered, becomes one of the most critical differentiators for VMware partners. Empowering its partners is always VMware’s number one priority. Efficiency, automation, and effectiveness is at the core of partner profitability. The VMware profitability journey is being redefined by its partners - especially those who are leveraging the new services offerings and are focussed on customer success.
VMware’s strategy to evolve channel partner profitability in fiscal year 2023 is via increased automation capabilities. The company is also equipping partners with the right tools, estimators, profitability models that help them evaluate both at the deal level and at the practice level. The new visibility tools this year will also better help guide partners to make the correct decisions in terms of ROI. VMware is looking at creating new ways for its partners to develop MSP offerings and being able to publish those offerings in marketplaces. The year 2022 will thus see VMware executing all these capabilities for its partner community.