VMware Channel Chief Primed to Drive Digital Transformation

VMware channel chief Sandy Hogan joins the company at a challenging and exciting time. There’s talk of a spinoff from Dell Technologies. The ongoing pandemic is causing upheaval for businesses and unease for partners. And, yet, VMware appears to be well-positioned and is making strides with its own transformation. A VMware outsider, Hogan replaced Jenni Flinders, who left the company in June.

Hogan, senior vice president, worldwide commercial and partner sales, spent 15 years at Cisco. Her last job was global vice president, digital transformation group. She worked for a couple of years at Here Technologies after leaving Cisco in 2017. Then, she spent one year at Rackspace as executive vice president, Americas managing director, before taking the top channel job at VMware.

VMware’s Sandy Hogan

If the times weren’t what they are, Channel Futures would be sitting face to face with Hogan at VMworld 2020. But, given the pandemic, our face-to-face is online. VMworld 2020 (virtual) just concluded, running Sept. 29-Oct. 1.

Hogan has thus far spent her tenure with VMware in her office. But that hasn’t stopped the new and vibrant VMware global channel chief. She meets with global partners and is digging her feet into her new role.

Channel Futures: As a way of introducing yourself to partners, elaborate on your leadership style.

Sandy Hogan: We’ve been working on this quite a bit as a team, with one of our focus areas around a partner-first culture. Of course, that piece is about validity of the programs and everything that we do, but so much of it is cultural. There are a few areas of my leadership style that I hope will transfer into a meaningful ecosystem development.

The first piece is the insatiable curiosity and the quest to drive areas of growth, and what’s possible. That’s important in this evolution. There’s no longer this linear way of solving for problems by themselves. I’m constantly asking questions – I’ve been on many partner calls today – and I’m pushing us out of the conversation of feedback on the program to where are [partners] investing. Where do they think they’ll see themselves in the next six months?

That “what’s possible,” and that type of questioning is important for us to see around corners. It helps us anticipate our partners’ needs and, not only where they plan to go, but if we do a good job of that, we can anticipate where they will go.

The second piece is that I’m a strong believer in what I’d call collaborative problem solving. That’s very internally-oriented, in that, I’m such a firm believer that the partner plays a critical role throughout everything in our organization. The partner is not a functional discipline; it’s a company discipline. I always feel like I’m a dot connector, figuring out how to better solve together to get to the answers. Everyone is already working a lot. Who wants to make it harder?

Third is having an engaged organization, but I would translate that to …