Ossama Eldeeb, Director, Partner Organization, Middle East, Turkey and North Africa, VMware, explains how channel partnerships are helping companies to transform.
Whether countries are still in the midst of the pandemic or in the tailwinds, the businesses within them are all aspiring for the same goals – to build relevancy, revenue and resiliency.
As they strive to weather an increasingly unpredictable world, it is technology vendors and their partners who are ideally placed to buoy these businesses. In an age where governments and enterprise businesses seek certain outcomes, they look to trusted partners, from systems integrators, to service providers, cloud providers to hosting providers, to deliver. And that value takes many forms – from providing consultancy to software or services, cloud management or hosting services to providing a myriad of value-added services to end-user organisations. Each play pivotal and often unique role in the digital worlds that organisations are seeking to inhabit.
If there was ever a truth in ‘technology being an enabler and cloud not a destination’, it is in this model where it is the partner, or partners, who are the conduits between these technologies and the customers’ business outcome.
It’s why our partner strategy incorporates the broadest range of organizations that can provide the right infrastructure and applications, via any cloud, to end-user customers. Many such businesses serve their customers directly and solo. This is true, particularly when certain bespoke consulting or regulatory services specific to a nation or industry, or even certain technologies, solutions or cloud services are required. But customers are increasingly seeing partners come together to deliver a seamless experience – and greater customer value.
It is these ‘partnerships of partners’ that are powering the world’s digital future.
The power of partnerships
Partners that have joined forces have increased their project win rate, as well expanding the scope of solutions they proposed. In fact, this association has enabled some of our partners to not only increase their win ratio by over 40%, but also accelerate their sales cycles as they increasingly find ways to keep themselves relevant in the customer journey.
But they need help to achieve that level of relevancy with the customer, and that’s where vendors come in. Last year VMware launched a fundamental transformation of the partner programme landscape, re-imagining the way the company does business with and for its partners to deliver on three core tenants: simplicity, choice and innovation.
We believe simplifying the partner experience, and introducing strong partner-led, use case-based expertise will spur customer projects to completion, and drive partner business and customer adoption. By fostering an agile and connected ecosystem, partners can be connected at different stages of the lifecycle, delivering value throughout, before and after the transaction itself. So, whether a partner is introduced at the stage of assessing, proving, scoping, designing, landing and expanding, or even managing on behalf of the customer, by coming together they can achieve the customers desired business outcomes.
Smoothing the path to cloud
As an increasingly partner-first organisation, we want to offer customers the foundation they need to help shape their business in this unpredictable world.
This foundation has become critical in the context of the great shift to the cloud paradigm we’re witnessing, with increasing numbers of CIOs seeking to modernise their legacy applications and transition to a SaaS-based model, in pursuit of greater scalability, consistency, and agility. This ability to deliver modern apps at the speed the business demands is critical in the context of a rapidly shifting, digital-first consumer landscape.
But the route to cloud is not always straightforward. Entrenched legacy infrastructures still pervade that aren’t equipped to support modern apps, and cloud complexity is growing as multi-cloud adoption becomes the norm.
Businesses need a faster path to cloud success; a platform that will allow them to match the needs of each app to the optimal cloud, grant them the freedom to use the most powerful cloud services as and when needed, and enable them to modernise applications so they can be run in the fashion that best suits the business. And a partner that can advise them on which cloud environment will ensure each application delivers on its business objectives and drives value.
That’s why we continue to enable our partners to become the experts in our digital platform, VMware Cloud. It brings together VMware Cloud Foundation, and its ability to offer consistent infrastructure across AWS, Azure, Google and every major public cloud – including access to more than 120 other VMware Cloud Verified partners around the world – with VMware Tanzu, and its ability to extend into native clouds, and free apps from infrastructure. Above all it equips partners – and end user organsiaton – to drive innovation without disruption to operations, and deliver any app, across any cloud, to any device, rapidly, with operational consistency and security.
Scaling technology prowess
The more our partners understand how this foundation can help the challenges their customers face, the more they can add value. The platform enables partners to rapidly deploy clouds of customers’ choice, that are reliable, secure and agile, with self-service and advanced automation capabilities. And provide valuable solutions and services on top, from app modernization to networking, intrinsic security to anywhere workspaces.
Our constant innovation in cloud is why we invest heavily in our Master Services Competency (MSC) programme – helping partners become the trusted experts customers need for scoping to deploying to managing any project. Partners who successfully achieve an MSC strengthen their expertise to drive future services growth, deepen customer relationships, and differentiate themselves in the marketplace.
Dilip Kalliyat, President of Huco, a Dubai-based technology solutions provider and VMware MSC partner, says: “MSC’s helps us explain where the differences are when customers engage with us. It moves us away from a product conversation onto a wider conversation about what their IT vision is, and how we can help them get there.”
The lifetime customer experience
Each customer has a starting point and an end goal, but the customer journey ultimately never ends. Adopting the customer-for-life mindset to continuously provide value and deliver customer needs is as essential as the solutions partners – individually or in partnership – can offer the customer.
