Vendors ‘Staffing Up’ On VMware Expertise Post-Dell: Says CEO

‘Like I tell our internal employees, day one for us post-spin-off [from Dell] may not look very different, but in day 365, you’ll see the benefits of it,’ says VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram, during the company’s fourth quarter earnings report.

VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram says a tailwind is brewing as vendors are now “staffing up” on VMware-certified personnel aiming to form new go-to-market and joint product solutions together after Dell Technologies spun out its majority stake in VMware this month.

“We are seeing a sense of excitement and possibility from the partners that are already planning to or are starting staffing up on their VMware expertise. We are talking to other partners about what we could do to help them further in the markets where we could have joint solutions,” said Raghuram during VMware’s third fiscal quarter financial earnings report with media and analyst on Tuesday.

Dell spun out its majority stake in VMware to Dell Technologies shareholders on Nov. 1, opening up new opportunities for VMware to form new or enhanced technology partnerships and go-to-market strategies with other companies. Raghuram said as an independent company now, other vendors are starting to bulk-up on VMware certified experts.

“So all these conversations have started happening. These all have different timelines depending upon whether they’re purely go-to-market or they involve technical collaboration and joint solutions, etc.” said Raghuram. “So I do expect to do start to see some results over the course of the next year. Like I tell our internal employees, day one for us post-spin-off [from Dell] may not look very different, but in day 365, you’ll see the benefits of it.”

[Related: Dell Spins Off VMware To Shareholders: 5 Things Investors Should Know]

In an interview with CRN this month, Lenovo’s Vladimir Rozanovich, senior vice president and president of North America, said Lenovo is now “doubling down” on its VMware partnership.

“You are going to see us absolutely doubling down with VMware,” said Rozanovich, Lenovo’s senior vice president and president of North America. “You’re going to start seeing us working more opportunities together. In the past, they were always working on opportunities with us, but there was always that thing in the back of everybody’s mind of, ‘Hey, are they engaging just to get them more customer information so that they give it over to their server counterparts?’ I think it’s going to be a level of trust that’s going to up-level now between how we work together moving forward.”

Prior to the spin-off, VMware and Dell formed a five-year joint commercial agreement that “preserves the most valuable parts” of the two companies partnership, “while allowing strategic flexibility for both companies,” Dell said in a statement to CRN this month.

“It includes strong technical and GTM experience that is unmatched in the industry, represented by existing solutions such as VxRail, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC and SD-WAN,” Dell said regarding its relationship with VMware post spin-off. “In addition, we have already aligned on 10 areas of joint interest and innovation including edge, telecom and 5G.”

Raghuram said VMware will continue to partner Dell in-tact, but will look to expand its portfolio and market reach via new partnerships with other vendors in order to become the world lead in multi-cloud software.

“As a standalone company, we have more strategic and financial flexibility to deliver on our multi-cloud strategy. We are also able to partner even more deeply with all the cloud and on-premise infrastructure companies to create a better foundation that drives results for our customers,” said Raghuram on Tuesday.

Looking at VMware’s third fiscal quarter financial earnings, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company generated revenue of $3.19 billion, an increase of 11 percent year over year.

VMware’s subscription and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) sales reached $820 million, up a whopping 21 percent year over year.

License revenue for VMware climbed to $710 million, up from $639 million in third quarter 2020. Total services revenue was $1.66 billion, an increase of 7 percent year over year.

Raghuram said customers continue to choose VMware as their trusted digital foundation to accelerate their innovation.

“We continue to expand and advance our portfolio to meet their needs in these three ways: one, deliver a cloud native app platform for building modern applications in a public-cloud-first world. Two, migrate enterprise applications to a cloud agnostic infrastructure. And three, build out the secure edge to optimize across our workspace and edge native applications,” said Raghuram. “It’s clear that multi cloud will be the model for digital business for the next 20 years, and in this vibrant dynamic marketplace, the pace of innovation is relentless—and VMware is at the center of it.”

VMware is expected its current fourth quarter 2022 revenue to reach $3.51 billion, which would represent a 7 percent increase year over year.