5. Ricky Cooper, VMware

VMware partners might be feeling a little uncertainty, given all the ups and downs regarding the pending $61 billion acquisition by Broadcom.

But there’s a lot happening at VMware that could assuage those fears, even though some change will inevitably occur once the transaction closes. 

Channel Futures sat down with Ricky Cooper, head of the worldwide channel and commercial organization at VMware to get the scoop on what’s been in the works and what’s on the horizon.

What is Cooper planning for partners? For starters, VMware has opened its commercial division to partner-led sales.

Now that VMware has gone through the Dell divestiture and introduced new commercial-level products including vSAN+ and vSphere+, debuting last June, executives decided it was time for a change. So, at the beginning of February, they shifted commercial sales to the partner-led model. Some internal sales experts will stay on the commercial team, but a number of them will move “up the stack a little bit,” Cooper said.

Learn more here about the changes that are in store at VMware.