VMware roadshow ‘personalises’ cloud

Channel manager sees benefit of face-time with resellers

By Simon Eskow, Auckland | Monday, 27 June 2011
Virtualisation provider VMware is holding quarterly roadshows to augment its seminars, partner exchange and annual forums.

The exchange, held on March 29 in Sydney, attracted 800 resellers from ANZ, up 41 percent from the previous year, according to a statement released by the company.

The roadshow, held from late May to early June, attracted another 400 attendees across seven cities, including 60 in Auckland on May 31 and another 40 in Wellington on June 2.

“It was one of the things I wanted to do when I joined,” says John Donovan, who moved from Novell to become VMware’s ANZ channel director in November 2010. “I wanted to re-connect with a lot of our partners in a much more dynamic face-to-face fashion.”

He says the roadshows have proven indispensable in updating resellers on VMware products as they roll out, providing them with an overview of market positioning and specific sales and technical training they might not otherwise receive.

“The sales group went into … a session where we taught them how to position themselves in the eyes of their customers as thought-leaders and trusted advisers in architecting that cloud vision for their customers,” Donovan says. “So rather than saying ‘this is what the cloud looks like, this is how public clouds operate and this what you must do,’ we gave them skills to be able bring it down to a personal level from their own experience as resllers and system integrators.”

VMware has been on a drive to double the number of VMware Certified Professionals locally from 400 to 800 by the end of the year.

He says that anecdotally speaking, the roadshows have helped the company to connect with potential new resellers and move closer to that goal.

“There were certainly a number of partners we spoke to at the roadshows and Datastor [forums, sponsored by VMware] that had not done significant business with us before. They were not particularly clear on how to go the next step in that journey from standard server infrastructure virtulisation further down the track, basically to delivering on the promise of IT as a service.”

Donovan says the roadshows allow the company to go into a lot more depth about its offerings than other venues, but that VMware relies on Datastor and its other distributor here, Ingram Micro, to help recruit new resellers.