Increasing Security Opportunities for Partners

CF: Are there increasing opportunities for VMware partners when it comes to security? And if so, can you give some examples?

VMware’s Ambika Kapur: For us, it’s important to work with a large partner network. Security, even though we make it really easy, is still a consultative sell. Customers are trying to piece together a larger environment for themselves. So partner services run anywhere from just consulting on what they should be deploying to getting them up and running with those services. And some of our customers even need help for those services to be managed for them. So it really depends. Customers don’t come in one size. People have different needs. They’ve adopted different models for themselves. So VMware has a pretty vast partner network to help with all of those, depending on where our customers kind of fall into that.

Skipper: And I would say that our partners are looking at us to be that security trusted advisor. So they’re looking at us to come in and help them with their services that they are building for their customers and augment that with our solutions. At the same time, bringing those solutions with a security trusted advisory relationship so that we can not just enable the partner, but the customer from a security mindset perspective.