Services the area of focus for VMware channel partners

VMware's UK channel boss is focusing on encouraging its partners to increase the services that they can offer around the vendor’s full portfolio.

Around 500 UK partners have been in Barcelona this week at VMworld Europe hearing directly from the vendor about its vision to build on its position as a hybrid cloud player to increase its reputation in the security market and the cloud management areas.

Alanzo Blackstock, director of partner organisation UK&I, VMware, said that it wanted to increase the services capabilities in partners to ensure they did not miss out on potential revenue.

"We are seeing that there is much more need for service richness in the market so we are seeing partners continuing services capabilities and we are on-boarding more services capable partners into our programmes," he said.

"Services is going to be a big thing for VMware from a partner perspective over the coming years. We see in order to get the full value of what our customers buy it needs our partners to deliver that full value of services," he added.

He added that it was important that partners understood all of the technologies that VMware offered and built services around them.

"Many of our partners already have services capabilities but what we are trying to do is give them the skills and competence to build us in their own services practice. That's what we are trying to do more aggressively and we have developed master competencies over the past few months to really help our partners with those skills," he said.

In his keynote session at VMworld Europe VMware's CEO Pat Gelsinger said that the telco community was a major opportunity for those selling virtualisation because the datacentre and public cloud environments were 90% virtualised but it was only 10% in the telco world.

"We believe that this is the largest virgin market opportunity that we collectively have and we believe that 5G will be the force that changes that," he said.

Blackstock said that the prospects of the telco's getting more involved with virtualisation could have an impact on the channel, particularly in terms of some of the voice players getting exposed to the vendor.

"We see much more opportunity to partner with those telcos. If you look at our partner programmes they have been much more focused around enterprise partners but there is a question of how do we treat telco's as a route to market and it's very early days but that could open up some significant opportunities," he said.