The future of VMware by Broadcom is here. In November 2023, Broadcom announced that we completed our acquisition of VMware, advancing Broadcom's strategy to build the world’s leading infrastructure technology company. As part of those efforts, we have invited all active VMware resell partners (more than 18,000) to participate in the Broadcom Advantage Partner Program. If you are the primary partner contact listed in our system, you should have received an email invitation sent on or about January 19th. You simply need to “click to accept” and you will receive a login to the partner portal when your participation goes live on Monday, February 5th, 2024.
What new offerings can our partners expect? As I mentioned in a blog last summer, at Broadcom, we have a very focused go-to-market strategy and don’t try to be everything to everyone. Instead, we open big opportunities for our partners to step in, do what we don’t, and profit from it. The same intention holds true today as we welcome our new VMware partners to Broadcom. With my new focus on resell and distribution, I wanted to hear directly from both Broadcom and VMware resellers and distributors. We gathered feedback from hundreds of partners globally—and the feedback was consistent. Solving channel conflict, reevaluate profitability on renewals, incentivize long term adoption of our products, and simplifying were key themes in your feedback. Based on that feedback, we evolved our Broadcom Advantage Partner program to achieve much of what our partners asked for. I’m excited now to share more details about this growing program.
What’s new?
The Broadcom Advantage Partner Program provides a proven, simple, yet scalable framework for all of our business units and partner routes to market. It also takes a modular and flexible approach to accommodate the unique needs of specific partner ecosystems. During our many conversations with you about your needs—and what worked and didn’t work with the previous partner program—we heard quite clearly that you needed simplification to reach your revenue potential. Here are some of the updates you can expect in the evolution of our partner program:
A net margin model: We have evolved the rebate program, which you told us was complex and administratively heavy. Many of you said you were often left wondering how much money you actually made. By moving to a net margin model, all discounts will systematically be disclosed up front. You will now know exactly what you’re making on every deal, consistently across both new and renewal business.
Streamline pricing: You also shared that so many solutions existed on the price list that you weren’t really sure what to sell and how to sell it. To help you and our mutual customers, we have simplified pricing down to four SKU bundles: VMware Cloud Foundation, vSphere Foundation, vSphere Standard and vSphere Essentials Plus.
Predictable partner profitability & deal protection: We heard that renewals matter. We agree. Our goal is to protect partners who originally found an opportunity so they can confidently invest in customer adoption and successful deployment of their VMware investments. To that end, we’ve introduced incumbency protection and deeper up-front discounts. We are creating these incentives for you to drive focus on delivering customer outcomes for 95% of the business through the incumbency protection policy.
Streamline systems & tools: We saw that VMware experienced rapid growth, and with that came multiple tools with multiple logins. At Broadcom, we have created a single online destination to access all partner related resources. We have established role based, single sign on & point of entry for all partner sales tools, systems and dashboards.
Increased resourcing & support: Partners consistently shared that cross route and channel conflict was a challenge. To reduce channel conflict and improve partner and customer success, we have taken steps to create better alignment with business units, sales and partner teams and provide better support and resources. How? We’ve defined partner-owned and partner-led segments within our customer base, opened up professional services for our partners so they can drive adoption and customer success at very attractive margins, and we’ve redesigned our internal structure so that business units, sales, and partner teams can work together and provide better support and resources to our partners.
We are committed to finding the best solutions for our partner community, and that takes time. We are not only transforming the business but simplifying solutions and moving partners into the Broadcom Advantage program. Change is disruptive and that’s a lot of change all at once. We did look at areas that were successful and retained those elements, taking opportunities to minimize disruption where it made sense. For example, to minimize disruption, we mapped your previous program tier over to the same tier in the Broadcom Advantage Partner Program. For more details about what to expect during this transition, I encourage you to visit our newly created FAQ.
The road ahead
At Broadcom, our goal is to help our global customers simplify their IT environment and make it more resilient and secure. You, our partners, are key to reaching this goal. We are committed to creating value within our ecosystem, which has only been made stronger with the addition of VMware’s partners. Our partners will be able to grow their businesses as we accelerate execution and drive expansion into private and hybrid cloud for enterprises.
At Broadcom, we know our partners are critical to our customers' and our success. We will continue to invest heavily in our Advantage program to ensure that we create a framework that partners are eager to invest in. To learn more about the Advantage Partner Programs, visit here. If you are a new VMware partner and have questions, visit our new FAQ or contact your Broadcom Partner Business Manager or the Broadcom Partner Helpdesk at Partner.Helpdesk@broadcom.com. Remember, we are here to provide you with the tools, training and information you need to make you—and our mutual customers—successful.