The Virtual Computing Environment Coalition, or VCE, a collaboration of Cisco, VMware and EMC, has announced the VCE Partner Program, focused on recruiting VARs and other channel partners to offer the company’s converged infrastructure portfolio.
The company had a partner program in place before, but after an event last February, VCE noted that “there was a clear message that our partners wanted more.”
The enhanced program offers new solution provider tiers and specializations, as well as benefits and incentives to both new and existing partners – along with the tools, materials and marketing opportunities.
Chris Sullivan, VCE’s vice president of sales, global channels and alliances, and D. Martin, vice president of indirect channels noted in a blog that “As VCE set out to transform IT with a simplified, true converged infrastructure, we also set out to transform our partner program with new opportunities for development, growth and revenue generation around converged infrastructure solutions.”
VCE offers a range of virtualized, converged infrastructure options for solutions partners to roll out, including the just-released VCE Cloud Accelerator Service, which helps customers plan, build and implement scalable as-a-service cloud infrastructure environments. These services combine business process, operations, and organization transformation expertise with pre-integrated service catalog capabilities for self-service portals.
To boost revenue growth, the partner program now has three tiers—Authorized, Silver and Gold, with enhanced the financial incentives for each tiers. Specializations for specific solution areas are also available, for mission-critical applications, end-user computing, messaging and communications, and professional services. Specializations will also help partners reach higher tiers within the VCE Partner Program.
Initially, there are two service competencies (deployment/implementation and management/operations) and two product-based buckets (messaging/collaboration for Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint and VDI) available.
“There is also a wide range of enhanced program incentives to further improve partner growth and profitability,” Sullivan and Martin noted. “This includes new training and sales enablement tools, pre-built marketing campaign materials, lead and demand generation programs, and technical resources – all designed to enable partners to grow their converged infrastructure business.”
