A channel strategy from VMware

Ed Dolman outlines the hottest topics for its channel over the rest of this year

The channel has played a key role in VMware's progress over the past year, accounting for up to 95 per cent of our revenue. It is no exaggeration to say our organisation lives and dies on the strength of its channel partnerships.

We saw a lot of change last year across the wider industry, with distribution channels continuing to consolidate – particularly thanks to Avnet's acquisition of Magirus, and TDAzlan's acquiring of SDG. There was also some nervousness following the sudden demise of 2e2, prompting businesses to take a closer look at the financial state of any prospective tech partners ahead of any long-term service provisioning.

We also saw the continued rise of both mobile working and social media, which go hand in hand.

Twitter's successful IPO showed that the stock market believes in the potential of this industry and as such will continue to pour investment into these companies. Social media will be around for the foreseeable future and businesses will have to embrace this element of IT if they want to remain competitive.

As for this year, here is my take on the subjects to be found at the heart of channel discussions.

Over the past year we saw a continued focus on end-user computing as employees became increasingly vocal about their IT expectations. Two billion smartphones are already in circulation and another billion will be added in 2014. More businesses are going to find themselves under pressure to manage the mobility needs of their workforce, including from shadow IT – if chief information officers fail to check the phenomenon.

Then there's data sovereignty. Although the Snowden revelations have not so far dampened the appetite for cloud computing, many organisations have become more worried about the location and jurisdiction of their mission-critical data.

Also, more governments will begin to bring in stricter laws and enforce levels of data governance and compliance. Data sovereignty will rise up the boardroom agenda, especially for businesses adopting or offering cloud and datacentre services.

Last year, the software-defined datacentre came to the fore. This year we will see widespread adoption. As businesses develop their cloud systems, making them increasingly sophisticated, there will be more hybrid implementations.

However, this means deploying an infrastructure robust and flexible enough to cope with integrating two connected but disparate environments. Educating our partners about the opportunities here is something that will play a big part in our 2014 strategy.

Microsoft is just weeks from withdrawing support for the XP operating system, so businesses will have to act sooner rather than later, or risk compromising security and efficiency across their IT estate.

Migration to Windows 7 will give businesses the chance to examine their end-user strategy and with mobility set to play a big part in shaping IT strategy over the next year, this is a great opportunity to reopen the discussion about sharing information safely and securely.

We are all set for 2014 be an even stronger year for the channel. We've tailored our strategy to help businesses develop efficient, flexible and reliable IT with the help of our network of resellers and other partners. Our aim is to continue to simplify IT.

Key to this will be the software-defined datacentre. And we want to put the channel into a position where partners can not only answer the current demands of their customer base but ready their IT environments for future challenges.

Ed Dolman is head of channel at VMware