Industry Voice: A focused shift to partner-delivered services generates new opportunities with Broadcom

Broadcom is investing in professional services — delivered through partners — for long-term customer success.

In the software industry, the existence of “shelfware”— software an enterprise buys but doesn’t use — is commonplace. IT vendors are selling more and more software to organisations. The sale goes through, then the vendor moves on to the next potential customer.

At Broadcom, we take a different approach: Our focus is on our customers’ long-term success. With our partners by our side, we spend time with our customers to ensure they’re using our solutions to the fullest. We prioritise and incentivise our sales and partner teams to focus on their installed base first, ensuring our customers fully adopt and realise the full value of their software investments.

As President and CEO Hock Tan wrote in a blog, our partner ecosystem is essential to our customers’ success. The customers we serve have to meet very complex requirements and have very complex IT environments with many silos; it’s not easy to integrate those silos into a streamlined platform. That takes heterogenous integration and technical expertise.

Investing in Partners with Expert Professional Services

Technical expertise is crucial to our customers’ success now more than ever, which is why Broadcom is making a big investment in partners who bring this expertise coupled with a strong professional services practice. In the past, the ratio of Broadcom to partner professional services has tended to be 70/30: Roughly 70 percent of total VMware professional services was delivered in-house, while partners delivered the remaining 30 percent. We’re now working to reverse that ratio, with Broadcom delivering 30 percent of VMware professional services and partners delivering 70 percent. That’s a shift that benefits both our partners and customers tremendously. It allows us to meet the demand for customers to deploy their VMware Cloud Foundation platform within their unique infrastructure. This approach empowers our partners to drive greater impact while enhancing and growing VCF in-region partnerships and expertise across Europe.

“Broadcom’s shift to having partners deliver professional services presents a broader opportunity for the company’s partners. Services offer the potential for better margin gains, and Broadcom’s committed investment in its partner community should result in a new revenue stream for those partners participating in the Program.”

Bola Rotibi, Chief of Enterprise Research, CCS Insights

We are expanding our Expert Advantage Partner program, adding more expert partners adept at helping customers solve their complex IT challenges. We have more training for our services partners, providing them access to Broadcom experts and to a marketplace where Expert Advantage partners can showcase their services and the critical integrations that they’ve created to help customers break down those complex IT silos.

Impact of Expert Advantage Partners on Broadcom Customers

Broadcom’s expansion of partner-delivered services allows our partners to unlock new revenue streams from margin-rich, value-added services. But the true winners in this shift are our customers. Due to the complexity of their IT environments, combined with the rapid pace of technological change and responses to that change from policymakers and regulators, our customers continually struggle to access a wide range of experts who can help them remain competitive. That’s where the Broadcom Expert Advantage Program comes in.

The Expert Advantage Partner will drive integrations across the customer’s environment. It will ensure full use of our technologies, leading to greater efficiencies, increased competitiveness, and cost savings. Customers will see higher volumes of enablement and training for their IT teams, and experience improved customer support in their local language.

Partner with an Expert Advantage Partner to Better Serve Your Customers

If you don’t have a service practice but want to offer services to your customers, find an expert on the Partner INSIGHTS portal and start a conversation by visiting expert.broadcom.com. You can also connect with the Broadcom Partner Help Desk to determine which partner can best support you and your customers. Similarly, if you believe your services practice would benefit by joining the Expert Advantage Partner Program, connect with the Partner Help Desk at partner.helpdesk@broadcom.com.

Broadcom’s shift to more services delivered by partners is a big opportunity for consulting services partners and our customers. We’re counting on our partners to help our customers fully adopt our technologies that help drive better business outcomes for our customers.

This article is sponsored by Broadcom.