VMware soothes partners' professional services fears
Virtualisation giant vows not to compete with partners on professional services
Virtualisation software giant VMware has assured partners it has no plans to compete with them in the professional services space.
The vendor posted its third-quarter 2011 results yesterday, which revealed that the firm's professional services revenue has grown year on year by 26 per cent to $71m (£45m).
In a press briefing at the firm's VMworld partner event in Copenhagen, Andy Hunt, vice president of EMEA partners and inside accounts at VMware, said its professional services activities account for less than five per cent of the firm's total revenue.
He admitted this burgeoning part of VMware's business has caused concern for partners, but stressed that the vendor's intention is not to compete with them.
"We are building a professional services business, but the focus of that is to pigeonhole ourselves right at the top end of our customer base and to build out the intellectual property that is going to be transferred into our partner ecosystem to drive our customers on this journey [to the cloud]," explained Hunt.
As an example of this, he cited the development of VMware's Solution Enablement Toolkits (SETs). These were launched in September 2010 to provide partners with the templates, training and materials needed to create packaged solutions that can speed up virtualisation deployments.
To take advantage of these, partners must have a competency, for instance in business continuity or desktop virtualisation, in the area the SET in question covers.
"[This is an example of us] taking the learnings we have made as a company, packaging them up and providing them to our partners so that they can get an accelerated start in developing their own practices in these areas," said Hunt.
"[Partners] can then add their own intellectual property to brand these offerings and to differentiate them [because] we want our partners to not just benefit from hardware and software sales, but services too."