Vendor Awards: Software - VMware

VMware has had a stellar year. Riding high on the virtualisation phenomenon that has persisted as cloud becomes the hot new topic of interest, the vendor picked up Software Vendor of the Year for the second consecutive year. It was a year that saw VMware acquire Zimbra, an email and calendar server that provides document storage, instant messaging and simplified administrative controls. It’s a product that VMware Australia and New Zealand managing director, Paul Harapin, reckons will see the vendor gain even more traction with its channel and adds significant revenue opportunity into the future.

“A real strong focus on expanding our footprint across our existing customer base with those technologies – technologies like systems management and real capacity planning for cloud capabilities,” Harapin said.

“We’re working with our service provider customers to bring to market even more VMware-based open cloud capability, and also with our Zimbra acquisition our e-mail collaboration platform, I think we’ll extend our footprint even further into the application and SaaS space.” Key for the success for Zimbra will be its different approach to market, Harapin said.

“VMware is taking a very different approach with our open source Zimbra platform, which is ‘we’re not going to compete with our channel and try and get them to sell our service, we’re actually providing them the technology that enables them to offer their own service which keeps their relationship with their customer, They own the data and capability, where we’re the just the technology provider that enables them to do that’,” he said.

“What my channel is telling me is they’re very frustrated by the propriety offerings from propriety vendors that are out there that says 'take our offering, resell it, we’ll give you a very thin margin, but we own the data, we own the customers that are on our cloud, and at any point they may be disintermediated’."

Harapin claimed the momentum behind Zimbra will hopefully propel it to new heights in 2011, but VMware was not ignoring its core product. “We’ve seen VMware partner closely with almost every vendor around,” he said.

That genuine relevance at the heart of the ICT industry and its dominant trends will see VMware go for the hat-trick next year.

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