VMware has long had a large GSI business but since early 2022 they have been working hard to deepen that, moving beyond determining value by services revenue, and getting more involved with GSI offerings.
The new solutions involve a joint Generative AI validated design and Dell Professional Services in collaboration with NVIDIA, all of which are also available through channel partners.
At Splunk’s Global Partner Summit Monday, the company made several announcements of special relevance to partners, including OT-focused Splunk Edge Hub, the launch of Splunk on Azure Marketplace, and a major extension of their partnership with SAP.
The extended partnership with Commvault follows up a major one with HPE early last year.
HPE’s emphasis on AI going forward was good news for Canonical, which is already strong in the area.
HPE made several major announcements in their opening keynote, but the one that clearly excited CEO Antonio Neri the most was entering the Artificial Intelligence public cloud market.
The new partnership was consciously designed as a replacement for the key role Datto has played with ConnectWise, which became far less attractive after Datto was acquired by ConnectWise’s largest competitor.
While the big change is the integration of the traditional Cloud Command and Metallic, most of the enhancements revolve around improved security, and enhanced partnerships with Microsoft and CyberArk were also announced.
Project Harmony was the one new initiative specifically for partners announced at this year’s Dell Technologies World, within the context of a news-rich event which will create many other partner opportunities.
Michael Dell thinks the commercial potential of Generative AI is greater than PCs and smartphones, although what the market seems to want from it, and what influencers think the market wants, are not the same thing.
Dell makes some major announcements around their as-a-service portfolio, including bringing their Project Alpine previews from last year out as projects, in what they are saying brings the whole APEX strategy to fruition.
ServiceNow will use NVIDIA AI Foundations cloud services and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform to develop new workflows using custom large language models, which use a customer’s own data, and which is much more accurate than gleaning it from the public domain.
The advanced support for Azure Virtual Desktop is part of ControlUp’s deepening of its relationship with Microsoft, which has engineering, sales and marketing components.
Dell’s exclusive deal will see it make CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform available to customers though multiple routes to market, and has led CrowdStrike to conclude that even a well-established company like themselves has much to gain from the partnership.
The new integration of Lenovo ThinkSystem Ready Nodes in ThinkSystem Servers with WEKA Data Platform software provides a broad horizontal play.
MLSE and AWS demonstrated the further extension of a partnership they announced last year, to provide new types of mixed and augmented reality capabilities around basketball and hockey, with further capabilities for these as well as the other sports that make up the MLSE empire on the way.
The integration of PAN’s Prisma Access with GCP’s BeyondCorp Enterprise lets Prisma users secure their devices through an unmanaged browser, while the Cortex platform has been strengthened by adding new proactive capabilities to Xpanse Active Attack Surface Management.
ThoughtSpot also made a deeper commitment to the AWS platform with the hiring of Britny Holloway as Director of AWS Global Alliances, while Rajesh Dhiman is now Senior Director, Global Systems Integrators.
Ananth Appathurai, who previously ran the company’s technology partner program, now has responsibility for the channel and advisor partner programs as well to drive forward an integrated Go-to-Market strategy.
The changes, announced at last week’s AWS Re:Invent event, makes it much easier for customers to move between vendors, and eliminates many of the lock-in barriers which have impacted the industry in the past.
