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

Beware of binge eating

"You don't harvest corn in June. But our field [team] keeps harvesting corn, because of quarter end pressure, way before the deals are ready," said Brown.

He said this causes partners to feel, at best, that the vendor is "blowing my project apart".

"And at worst… the partners say 'You guys are idiots. It's a three-quarter-long project – it's been funded. There's no risk to budget, yet you come in to discount by 18 percent to pull it into quarter. Of course they [the customer] are going to take it, but you were going to get the money next quarter anyway. So what the hell are you doing?'

"Partners, as business people, are looking at our field and going 'That's not healthy! That's binge-eating. That's not sustainable stuff.'"

The current situation requires VMware to restructure the "the economic model" and "the engagement of the field" so that the channel is "rewarded for healthy growth", said Brown.

Develop your own IP

Brown told the vForum crowd that "fearless innovators" in the channel would end up as the successful ones.

"How many folks in here have developed your own IP? Right, I'm going to say all of you should raise your hand because if you've developed solutions architectures, as you've developed ways to go to market and talk about stuff, you are creating IP," said Brown. "You're innovating for your customers and creating solution value."

The global channel exec said that every technology company is started by an "unemployable technologist".

"What I mean is that they don't like working for other people, so they go out and start their own [company] and become entrepreneurs... So that fearless innovation is really important."

The ultimate compliment

Promising to reform the VMware partner program, Brown said that there is one defining metric that indicates the quality of a program to him: "VMware systems engineer retention rate". When engineers leave to join the channel, it shows the partner program is lucrative.

"When my SEs – who are trained by us, have lived through our architectures and know how to draw up design solutions – say it's better to be a partner than a salaried employee with a fixed bonus, that's the thing I'm looking for.

"I want VMware employees looking at your businesses and saying, 'It might be better to go do that'. We'll get there."