Ben Matheson: The vMarketing Expert 

With the recent release of vSphere 4.1, I wanted to take a look back at the past year and share a few of the many recognitions and awards VMware has received. Like in year’s past, VMware has overwhelmingly been chosen by customers and analysts as the industry-leader in virtualization, but this year is particularly special – here’s why.

In 2009 and 2010 VMware has concretely maintained its leadership position despite facing more competition in server virtualization and desktop virtualization than ever before. Additionally, we successfully educated customers, media and analysts on how vSphere is the best platform for cloud computing initiatives; providing VMware with significant recognition as a major player in the cloud. VMware’s solid position as the industry leader in all-things virtualization has led to two particular recognitions that I would like to share with you, reflecting how customers view VMware and how one of the most intensive analyst reports on virtualization to date rated VMware as the clear leader. Here is a breakdown of both.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure

The x86 virtualization infrastructure market is a foundation for two extremely important market trends: infrastructure modernization and cloud computing. Gartner rated virtualization vendors on two broad aspects for their report – completeness of vision and ability to execute. VMware, being compared along with eight other virtualization vendors (including Citrix and Microsoft), was rated highest in both categories by a significant margin. Here is a look at Gartner praises for VMware and questions for competitors:

Gartner praises VMware for:

· Far-reaching virtualization strategy that includes enabling cloud computing, new application architectures and broader management

· Technology leadership and innovation

· High customer satisfaction

· Large installed base (especially in the Global 2000), and rapid growth of service providers planning to use VMware (vCloud initiative)

While questioning competitors for:

· Offering "Limited innovation and reactive strategy in a rapidly evolving market"

· Facing an "Uphill battle breaking into a very strong VMware installed base, especially in large enterprises"

· Failing to link virtualization and Cloud, offering an "evolving strategy and road map with respect to virtualization's tie with cloud computing"

· While delivering a product with a "Single point of failure/planned downtime in parent operating system"

For further information on the Gartner study, please view: Gartner-VMware-Magic-Quadrant.pdf

The next recognition VMware is particularly proud of is vSphere 4’s multiple award wins at Microsoft’s Tech•Ed 2010 conference. vSphere 4 was not only chosen for “Microsoft Best of Tech•Ed 2010 Virtualization Product” by media outlets Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine, but also chosen as the Attendees’ Pick – selected by more than 10,000 customers, partners, and staff at the conference. vSphere 4 won the Attendees’ Pick out of nearly 50 exhibited products that were nominated for the award across all categories at the show.

The Tech•Ed awards signify the continued recognition of VMware as the best platform to run Microsoft apps by media, customers and partners.

VMware continues to hold its leadership position in the industry and will have significant announcements at VMworld 2010 that will further enhance our industry-best solutions for customers and boost awareness of vSphere as the go-to platform for cloud computing. Hope to see you at VMworld.

Ben Matheson
Senior Director, Global Partner Marketing

Doug Smith: Leading with Partners

As you know, VMware announced, on July 13^th, the availability of vSphere 4.1, the most advanced virtualization platform for the cloud computing era. With vSphere 4.1, companies of any size will be in the best position to not just virtualize infrastructure and applications, but experience a new era in datacenter management that can change the role of IT from a cost center in constant need of resources to a service center that is focused on evaluating and implementing new, innovative applications and services that provide businesses with a competitive edge.

Along with the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware has expanded its management portfolio licensed for cloud environments – broadening the vCenter product family in two areas: configuration & compliance management and application dependency mapping. VMware has created a new licensing and pricing model based on the volume of virtual environments, not the physical hardware, aligning licensing to the adoption trends of our customers.

Additionally, VMware is announcing the new accumulative VMware Volume Purchasing Program (VPP), providing incremental, tier-based discounts for VMware partners to offer their customers over a rolling two-year period. The new accumulative VPP offers online tools that VMware customers and their authorized affiliates can use to track and manage VPP memberships and discounts. By bringing the VPP program to your customers, you increase your customers loyalty to you by providing your customers the best financial options for building a virtualization solution and realizing the quickest ROI on their investment.

The new VPP program features a better license model and accumulative buy program. Here are some key benefits of VPP today:

· Receive financial incentives when you purchase VMware products in volume with discounts on eligible license products

· Achieve budget predictability since discounts are guaranteed for up to 2 years

· Simplify your acquisition of VMware software through a standardized purchasing program

VMware has established four discount levels that range from 4-12% for qualifying orders based on your accumulated VPP Point total.

Accumulative buy:

The new accumulative buy program ensures that purchases made after the initial purchase (of 250 points or more) are added to your point total to determine your new eligible discount level. This is an exciting new step in the program, as it ensure that you can jump from a 4% discount to a 6% and so on as your point total rises. The ‘buy-more-pay-less” system is now a two year rolling buy program: welcome!  

For more information please visit the VPP enrollment portal at www.vmware.com/go/vpp-enroll to enroll as a new member or as an affiliate of an existing VPP customer.

Doug Smith
Sr. Director Global Partner Sales
http://www.twitter.com/smith_douglas

Partners please note that you should be logged in to your VMware Store account in order to download the vSphere 4.1 bits.  You can login to your account and access the download page here. 

Once you click the download button you will be prompted to sign a new EULA.  Once you agree the download page will appear with the applicable option to download the ESX 4.1 bits.

 Ben Matheson: The vMarketing Expert 

Hi All – As many of you know, HP has been a great partner to VMware for the past 8+ years and we’re proud to have such a long-standing relationship. Many of the solution providers that read this blog are also very close partners with HP so I wanted to let you know that this week we announced 5 exciting new solutions at HP TechForum 2010 in Las Vegas that are worth your time finding out more about.

We have been working with HP to validate these solutions to ensure our technologies work together seamlessly and we have created a series of technical, sales and marketing materials that should help you generate revenue and profitability with your customer base. The solutions are: 

1. Affordable Virtual SAN Appliance for SMBs: We’ve created a soft-bundle that channel partners can sell to their customers that combines VMware vSphere™ Essentials Plus with the HP P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA). This solution really targets SMB companies as it provides organizations with affordable, easy-to-deploy infrastructure virtualization.
2. Enterprise-class scalability, performance and high availability: This solution provides high availability to midsize companies. We’ve validated that HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) Cluster is compatible with VMware vSphere to allow these customers to consolidate up to 600% more virtualized storage, reduce complexity, improve capacity utilization and lower management costs.
3. Virtual desktop reference architecture: We have created a Converged Infrastructure reference architecture for VMware View featuring the new HP P4800 BladeSystem SAN. This solution, which is targeted at the VMware View market, brings value-added design plus full reference architecture to partners. We see the desktop market as a massive growth opportunity and we hear the same feedback from many of our solution providers.   
4. Simplify and Scale Infrastructure Virtualization: This solution combines HP’s networking module, HP Virtual Connect, with VMware vSphere to reduce complexity around the network. It provides scalability for up to 4x more VMs per blade, eliminates 95% of network access equipment and reduces power and cooling costs by 40 percent with the new HP ProLiant G7 servers.
5. Faster time to value: This is a consulting solution on HP and VMware technologies that will enable partners to help their customers build out private clouds within their datacenter and deploy management, disaster recovery and business continuity, in addition to desktop virtualization across their infrastructures.

 To find out more information about these solutions search on VMware Partner Central or at HP’s partner portal. View the release here: http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/hptechforum-vmw-hp-advisory.html

Ben

Matheson
Senior Director, Global Partner Marketing

Cloud Computing: Interfacing with vCloud APIs

Watch this popular VMware Partner Exchange presentation for an architectural overview of vCloud APIs and how they work with vSphere APIs. Great session for developers looking at vCloud APIs for cloud development

    View presentation http://vimeo.com/11266739

Top Ten Things CIOs Should Know About vCloud

Senior member of the VMware technical staff Steve Jin explains the top ten things every CIO should know about vCloud.

Read more http://www.doublecloud.org/2010/05/top-ten-things-a-cio-should-know-about-vmware-vcloud/

What Does it Take to Build Clouds?

Partners often ask vCloud Architect Mike DiPetrillo about the people or skills needed in order to start building their own clouds. Read how he breaks it down by the three hardest parts of building a cloud service.

Learn more http://blogs.vmware.com/vcloud/2010/05/skills-needed-for-building-clouds.html

 Ben Matheson: The vMarketing Expert 

Hello Everyone – One thing our channel partners consistently tell me is “Give us more air cover” or “Drive more awareness of virtualization into the marketplace”. Clearly, it is a benefit to all of you – our partners – if we help drive customer awareness around the value of deploying VMware software as the platform for cloud computing.

I’m proud to say we are launching a new customer awareness campaign that will run from now through the end of the year.  The focus of the campaign is empowering our customers to move beyond the constraints of today’s datacenter to focus on the possibilities of tomorrow. It mirrors our technology vision – that customers should not be constrained by the same old way of managing their datacenters. You can’t have breakthrough results unless you think differently. In our case, this means un-shackling customers from the constraints of traditional, brittle physical datacenters and starting on the journey to cloud computing. As you probably know, cloud computing is an approach to computing based on leveraging efficient pooling of resources to provide on-demand, self-managed virtual infrastructure that is consumed as a service. And of course when I say virtual infrastructure I mean VMware vSphere. 

Cloud computing helps customers move beyond the old physical infrastructure.

You will start to see our new “Move Beyond” campaign in banner ads on a lot of online properties as well as in select print publications.  As a partner you should familiarize yourself with the message by checking out the online assets related to the campaign by visiting: http://www.vmware.com/movebeyond/ 

Ben Matheson
Senior Director, Global Partner Marketing

One of the fun parts of my job is meeting with customers when they visit VMware’s Briefing Center here at our headquarters in Palo Alto, California – in the heart of Silicon Valley. [snip]

In these customer meetings, a question that comes up from time to time is “We know you guys are the clear leaders today. How do you intend to maintain your leadership position moving forward?” A fair question, upon which I walk them through our overall business strategy to enable IT-as-a-Service through cloud computing, product roadmaps, and our competitive differentiation (most of which are captured on our Why Choose VMware and Advantages of VMware Virtualization web pages).

But if you read between the lines, their question is also about an attitude check – one that is often posed to industry leaders. It is a check to make sure that VMware’s success has not somehow made us complacent in regards to changing market dynamics or offerings from other vendors. Basically they are asking, “Are you guys resting on your laurels?” And the answer is “Absolutely not!”

Read full article

Last week VMware announced very positive business results for the first quarter 2010, beating analyst expectations by a considerable margin. Needless to say, we are thrilled to see how customers continue to turn to VMware to reduce complexity, dramatically lower costs, and increase business agility.

In the earnings call, our execs also described how we saw strong momentum in our vSphere bundles for small and medium businesses (vSphere Essentials, vSphere Essentials Plus and vSphere Acceleration Kits). For some people, hearing this may be a bit of a surprise as other virtualization vendors have been trying to create the misconception that VMware’s virtualization is too expensive for small businesses. Microsoft, for example, claims that Hyper-V and System Center are 3x to 12x less expensive than the VMware’s Essentials bundles. Ultimately, nothing better than positive business results demonstrates how such claims are a misrepresentation of reality, but just in case, here is some simple math that proves it.

Read full article

See it here LIVE on April 27th

Learn More Now

While browsing through the Microsoft Virtualization website, I stumbled across this table included in the Cost Saving section that presents cost and feature checklist comparison between Hyper-V/System Center with few vSphere editions. While Microsoft’s spin on the theoretical cost advantage of Hyper-V/System Center over vSphere isn’t surprising (I am not going to address it here, since we have already shown how it doesn’t hold water), the checklist comparison struck me as having a few factual errors and misrepresentations of actual product capabilities which I think are worth pointing out

Read the full article

On February 4^th, Citrix issued a press release announcing ‘Citrix Dramatically Improves Economics of Desktop Virtualization to Drive Mainstream Adoption’. The focus of the release was to communicate that one physical server had been verified to support 125 VDI based desktops, 500 hosted shared desktops, and 5000 local streamed desktops. This Competitive Flash is to help VMware Partner Sales Teams understand VMware’s positioning in regards to the announcement and to respond to customer questions.