The best partner program can't save bad products: VMware

VMware's global channel boss was in Sydney last week, where he offered some home truths about the ways vendors mistreat partners.

"You'll hear vendors all the time say: partners are an important extension of our sales force – well, that's just horse crap," said worldwide partners and alliances senior vice president Ross Brown.

Brown was delivering the partner keynote at VMware's vForum conference in front of a packed Australian channel audience at The Star casino.

[Photos: Who was at VMware vForum Sydney?]

He said that "the best partner program cannot save bad products" and although VMware has "incredible technologies", they are only as good as the solutions that partners provide the end customer.

Brown said IT infrastructure is the equivalent of plumbing.

"We sell toilets... It's a necessary feature of a place to live. But how many of you here bought your apartment or house because of the toilet?

"It's not why you buy the house. And no-one buys our software or buys a data centre because they want a data centre – they buy it to deploy a HANA environment to do better BI, or be able to raise the productivity of their users through an e-commerce solution.

"Our stuff is the enabling fabric. You guys create those solutions."

Brown said that this is why channel partners cannot be seen as merely an extended sales force. He encouraged local partners to communicate to VMware the nature of their businesses, and let the vendor do the groundwork to find suitable technologies.

"Let us work to find how we put our technology into that solution, rather than saying 'come sell NSX and come sell vSAN' and be a product-orientated sale. I want to figure out how we create value in your business."

Software-defined is a hard sell

In a frank admission, the US executive told Australian partners that VMware's much-spruiked 'software-defined data centre' is a hard sell in the real world.

"At a sales level, it's very hard to sell SDDC," said Brown. "You sell a vision but you actually implement project by project by project – and it may not be that you implement all the layers of SDDC."

He added that many different partners, depending on their speciality, may contribute each layer for a particular customer to eventually reach the software-defined data centre concept.

Partners that proactively educate themselves to take on more layers would benefit, according to Brown.

Next: vendor impatience