It's been over a year since Broadcom's VMware acquisition, and as a partner with deep technical expertise, I am excited to be part of the highly successful Broadcom Knights program. Newly grandfathered into the program, I arrived at the recent Broadcom Americas partner event in Orlando, Florida not only to get useful knowledge and hands-on experience, but also to learn more about the Broadcom Knights program: What other certifications do I need to obtain? What does it mean to be a full-fledged Knight? Is that goal even achievable for our company or something we even wanted?
The event provided the answers to these questions and so much more, including valuable training about how these solutions are helping customers meet – and exceed – their business goals.
Helping Broadcom Customers Fully Explore VMware Solution Benefits
Conscia is a leading provider of cybersecurity and networking solutions for mission-critical IT infrastructure for Enterprise customers. Conscia’s experts design, implement, and run innovative, customized IT solutions across cybersecurity, networking, and hybrid cloud, supporting our customers throughout their technology lifecycles. Conscia serves large organizations.
I am based in the Dutch office of Conscia, in the Netherlands. In addition to the Netherlands, we have offices in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Slovenia. Our Netherlands team works primarily with hospital organizations, where we often discover that a lot of their VMware solutions are not being utilized in a proper manner (or not at all), and, as a result, are turning into shelfware. The customers have already invested their money in the solutions, but are not using them to their full potential.
One of my top jobs is helping customers realize the full value of their VMware portfolio. So, I was very excited to attend the hands-on lab in Orlando for Holodeck Toolkit, a tool that enables users to set up multiple environments to test drive VMware solutions such as VMware NSX, VMware vSAN, VMware VCF, and vSphere Supervisor. Using this tool, we can simulate real-world scenarios, refine our technical skills, and provide compelling demonstrations to customers. If a customer wants to see how a product works, I can spin up a new test environment with a click of a button, demo the solution to the customer, and then easily scrap the test environment when the demo is over. Since I’ve returned from Orlando, I’ve actually started using Holodeck within our own company to make sure that our engineers can access this powerful test lab demo environment.
Another great session focused on the next version of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). There, we gained great insights to help customers, once VCF is available, make sure that they are using it the right way, and only renew the products that they need. In addition to participating in the hands-on training and knowledge sharing at the Orlando event, our team (there were three of us from Conscia) took – and passed – the remaining exams that needed to be a Broadcom Knight. In total, we went home with five additional certifications that we all achieved together. We also had a chance to meet both peers from around the world as well as our Broadcom colleagues, whose expertise and partner-enablement resources are instrumental in helping us serve our customers.
What’s Next
The Broadcom Knights program is not just about technical mastery; it cultivates a strong community of technical professionals who support each other with insights and solutions across all products of the VMware by Broadcom infrastructure. As Broadcom continues to evolve this ecosystem, the Knights program ensures that we remain at the forefront of technological excellence whether troubleshooting issues, exploring new features, or refining best practices.
And it’s not just about Broadcom investing in their partners; it’s about the partners investing in their relationship with Broadcom. While the information, hands-on training and certification exam prep at the Orlando event was free, our company paid our expenses to travel there because they recognized the importance of the Broadcom Knights program to our customers and the company at large. For example, the certificates we earned not only help to make us more valuable to our customers, but they also are needed for our company’s partner status within the Broadcom Partner Program. It also gave us a great opportunity to showcase our own expertise and value to our customers.
The next step for the three of us from my company who attended the event is to work with our colleagues in the other countries to get them on board as well. I already know a few of them who have expressed interest in attending the Broadcom Knights event in Amsterdam in March . The Orlando event proved to be a great platform to align on the latest technical advancements and reinforce the knowledge-sharing culture that defines the program. It was a great way to kick off the year and get us excited about what’s ahead for Broadcom’s VMware portfolio.