News

VMware Launches Partner University

• By Scott Bekker
• 02/23/2009

"One of the things that's become crystal-clear to us is that there's a direct correlation between the amount of training our partners get and how much sales they do. More training means more revenue and more profitability," said Ben Matheson, senior director of global partner marketing at VMware. Matheson added that about 80 percent of VMware's revenues come through partners.

While VMware previously offered online training, the VMware Partner University brings it all together under a single tab within the VMware Partner Central portal, Matheson said.

The content is now organized into four tracks: sales professional, pre-sales, post-sales and services. The services track covers the prescriptive guidance offerings that VMware provides to partners for generating service revenues. An example of one of those programs would be performing an assessment for customers of which systems to virtualize in their environments and in which order.

Each of the tracks leads to a VMware accreditation, closing a loop between online training and VMware certification for the first time, Matheson said.

Initially, the Partner University content is available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Russian. Matheson says other languages will be considered later.

Also on Monday, VMware opened registration for its second annual VMware Partner Exchange conference, which will take place April 14-16 in Orlando, Fla. The conference this year will combine two previously separate VMware partner conferences -- Technology Exchange, which was for ISVs, OEMs, storage vendors, networking vendors and independent hardware vendors; and Partner Exchange, designed for VARs and system integrators.

VMware executives speaking at the event will include new COO Tod Nielson, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations Carl Eschenbach and CTO Stephen Herrod.

According to Matheson, VMware hopes to nearly double last year's Partner Exchange attendance to about 1,500 partner attendees this year.