Broadcom & VMware - Post Merger Opportunities
Transcript
foreign this is going to be an interesting conversation because the broadcom merger with VMware is going to close at some point and this is all just my prediction and guessing but I will guess we had Dan Newman from future group on a couple of days ago he talked about what's going to happen what he believes is going to happen after the broadcom acquisition closes and I'm I'm in alignment I think if Josh others the CEO of end to end we'll get into what you do later
but Josh my prediction is that hot time is probably going to cut 50 of VMware jobs like he is going to take a x to the organization and make managers basically prove that they can't do their current jobs without 50 of the resources and I think one of his methods is doing this that they're going to do something what we've seen similar to Dale which is to take basically what we called commercial sales at VMware so anything that's not a large organizations and push that those
that sale out to the channel so direct will be a lot less direct sales to Via VMware and a lot more to the channel a problem with that is I would say the VMware channel is already pretty stretched thin talent wise it's a classic resource problem it takes immense skill to develop and deploy architectures that uh meet the standards of today's hybrid infrastructures so first off I wanted to give have you give us a lay of the land can you kind of explain the VMware kind
of expertise certification ladder for us oh sure absolutely so basically we start with the vcp I won't go through the the lower level Associates but traditionally we start with the vcp VMware certified professional so this is the entry level certification you have to set a proctored exam it requires a reasonable level of experience and training to get this level so I wouldn't say it's incredibly hard but I wouldn't say it's easy either so vcp is a reasonable level to achieve that's probably well it's definitely by
far the most common level there's hundreds of thousands of vcps in the world I even have one it's a big number I have one and I haven't I have a BCP and you would know it's not an easy exam right but it's not an impossible so it's a good level to test your Baseline skills so above this we have the VMware certified Advanced professional or vcap as it's called affectionately so the vcap covers a lot of different areas a lot of different tracks so it's not
just data center it's also networking and desktop and things like this so you have a design exam which is focused around the architecture piece and you have a deploy exam which is the Hands-On implementation skills so these are really in my opinion the bar at which a partner wants to aim as a minimum because that's showing you not only know the general layer the vcp but you have good skills in design and implementation so we'll pause separate sector on this and this is this is the
Workhorse of the workforce right these are the folks racking and stacking equipment being in our commands on the command line configurations they're taking designs and making them real they're usually the first line of troubleshooting absolutely they are they are the lifeblood of the bar Community absolutely and I think you know one thing I talked about with Carl Childs the vcd expert program manager this week was that there was a lack of vcap level certified in people so the ratio I can't recall off the top of
my head between vcp and vcap but it was a very low number so there's a hundred thousand plus vcp there's a very small amount of vcap level above that so it's very important to VMware I think and to Partners and customers that we expand that recap level so this is the first stress point of when broadcom I believe is going to push out commercial sales to the partners where the partners just need enough of this low level talent and by the logo I mean I don't
mean low skilled I mean low level the first level of Defense talent to meet the demand of pre-sales meeting uh initial consultations kind of qualifying deals this level of blocking and tackling so let's move up a level from vcap yeah so look about vcap if you have two vcaps in the same track so if you have the data center design and the data center deploy you get what's called vcix which is VMware certified implementation expert so there's not an exam for that it just requires you
to do two vcaps so that really is showing you've got a good base in design and implementation so this is a pretty valuable person I would say who can get that vcix level especially across multiple tracks because one individual may have desktop vcix and they may have data center bcix so so I will still call this kind of a very tactical level because your vcix and from a practical sense you can say I have a requirement for 10 000 desktops and I'm going to deploy that
within the data center or hybrid cloud or the public Cloud I have the skill to do the a basic design and the Hands-On capability to actually deploy that solution yeah absolutely and I think if Partners were all at that level that would be a great achievement I don't think it's easy for all the partners to get there in fact my personal opinion is it's very difficult for most Partners to get to that level which is why they're not there that's basically the Gap as you say
the bottleneck so we're already at the bottleneck and there's a layer higher than that there is so there's the VMware certified design expert so this has actually been around for about 15 years it's not a new certification and it's designed for the Enterprise and solution architect so you actually have to submit documentation to VMware which is reviewed against a blueprint if that is up to a certain standard you were then invited to present that to a panel of experts to see if you're capable from an
architecture perspective from a Consulting perspective and then you're granted vcdx assuming you pass that exam so there's only 300 in the world and and this to me is very disappointing training I did vcdx I've got two vcdx's actually and I would have hoped by now there would have been 2 000 vcdx's because I think it's an incredibly valuable skill set it teaches you a lot about what you don't know and therefore you can get better so that's where I think the vcap and vcdx level you
know needs to be accelerated significantly so with that with all bar partnership programs we can look at Cisco as the one of the kind of Premier models the equivalent level would be kind of a ccie Loosely mapped to vcdx and you need you know a certain number of ccies a certain number of ccds a certain number of ccnas uh Etc ccnps all these acronyms you need a certain number of each one to qualify for not just discounts but deals like when NSX came out you have
to have a bcdx on staff that understood in NSX just to sell NSX so this is a bottleneck and something that bra.com will have to deal with when they go to push out cells to the the channel the partners but you think you have a solution to this or at least a partial solution yeah absolutely um I definitely think it is a solution in fact I think it's very difficult to train people up to a vcdx level because there's not a lot of ecdx's who can
mentor there might be partners who don't want to Mentor other partners there might be a whole bunch of reasons why it's difficult to get to that level and I would say the biggest barrier is the effort I don't think it's an unachievable level you know I'm not some genius that you know has managed to achieve it I've just put the work in so it's just a high barrier to entry so when I founded end-to-end Enterprise architecture I thought why not bring together multiple vcdx's so that
we can provide that service primarily to other partners and provide partner to partner services so my team can complement element the great work the partner's already doing and fill in the Gap whether it be NSX to your point or whether it be a new solution or a complex solution or in the event something's deployed and there is a critical situation that needs management or re-architecting we can come in solve that situation hand it back to the partner and then the customer gets a great outcome the
partner keeps the business and we get some business as well so kind of vcdx as a service absolutely that you could call that we should use that acronym actually you can be part of my marketing team there you go so you know I know a couple of your vcdx's like there's there's only like you said there's only 300 in the world you'd be surprised where they work a lot of them work for VMware a lot of them were acting now for AWS because it is a
very transferable skill set it is absolutely as you stated before you're just showing what you don't know but it is at a architectural level and you can take this skill and apply it to almost any Cloud technology yeah you can so I think the really important thing about vcdx is it's while it is a VMware expertise for sure if you took 80 of that certification it's transferable to anything else so a lot of ecdx's like you say went to hyperscalers and have been very successful because
the methodology is the important part the physical layer or the technology piece in my opinion is the easiest piece to learn the methodology and that approach is by far the heart of Peace So what we're going to do is help customers especially on multi-cloud Journeys where there's lots of different physical layers being the hyperscalers or the on-prem or hybrid setup we're going to help deliver that outcome where Partners might not have simply the time there's there's one partner who reached out who actually has a vcdx
they simply just don't have the time to deploy some of the work so they would like to engage a trusted partner like us to help complement their Workforce so it's not just to provide a skill set that's not there it's to complement the existing skill set now this has traditionally been a no-fly zone partner to partner Partnerships uh have been a no-fly zone in the past because there's this you know this there's this cherished asset that each partner has which is the relationship with the customer
with me and customer yes how you've been able to overcome that that you know kind of political barrier well I think it's just through a genuine interest to help the customer so if I'm honest if I just take the business off let's say it's your customer and you're missing a skill set in NSX and I just come in and wipe you off the floor and take over well the customers lost your value and yes they've got some value from me but wouldn't it be better that
they have both because obviously you've known them for a while you know the ins and outs of their business more intimately I can just come in and complement that I get business you get the business the customer gets the best of both worlds I don't see a problem with that I actually think it's a benefit to me as a business as well because I might not have a resource in whichever location that you're operating but I can fly someone in who can help on the project
or they can do it oftentimes remotely as well so I think it's a win-win I don't have a problem with it and I think when I sit down with partners and have that conversation most don't have a problem with it either so how do you enable the overall growth of the skill set because uh I think this is absolutely an example of a rising tide left all bolts how do you grow the capability within the partner ecosystem so to my point if a customer doesn't have
or a partner doesn't have the skill set we might come in we'll do the design piece we'll come in and do checkpoints throughout the project and then we'll do an operational verification at the end so throughout that process the partner might not have the skill to implement part or all of that design so we would simply encourage them to shadow that opportunity that implementation and we would upskill that person throughout that journey of that project in addition we also have VMware certified instructors who can run
VMware official training or if a customer or a partner needs us to create a boot camp or a training course for a certain topic very specific to their environment might be a service provider then we can just create that content for them deliver that and Mentor them specifically on technology which is not necessarily aligned to a vcap exam vcdx exam it's just a business outcome yeah so much of this is not the technology as you mentioned you know it's if this was a technology we could
just literally block Buy data centers as a service and it's not that simple it's not it is a lot about local regular regulations there's uh Geographic latency concerns there's kind of business process concerns uh all of this is what I call a Last Mile business yes when you can't simply go to the cloud you have Last Mile issues and you need expertise with boots and shoes or sandals on the ground to solve these problems yeah absolutely and I think I was at the vcdx Town Hall
Town Hall earlier this week and obviously in a room of Brewing people so I always like going to those events but one of the people gave an example where um to your original point about VMware doing direct sales they were saying well yeah VMware were doing a great job the nsbu would come out and sell NSX and talk to the value and they did an amazing job but the customer actually didn't have a partner to tie it all together so the technical solution NSX is fantastic
it's well proven there's great reference architectures but like you say it's the last mile so you've got the customer requirement you've got the solution here but you need the Enterprise architecture and you need the solution architecture in the middle to actually bring it together so what broadcom may or may not do I happen to agree with you on that point I think they will push out a lot of that business whether they do or don't VMware should be doing this middle piece if they want their
top end customers to get the great outcomes and if VMware aren't doing it they should give it to Partners who have that capability so obviously I'm biased I've started the company to do that piece but to me if a partner or if a customer does not have a partner with Enterprise architecture skills and solution architecture skills then regardless of how good VMware is doing technology wise and in my opinion their innovation has been fantastic the last few years then it's not going to deliver the outcome
that we expect so this piece in the middle is is important and if a partner has a gap in one or both places or even a small subset well I'm happy to fill that Gap so Josh I really appreciate you stopping by the CT advisor Studio to kind of share your journey as an entrepreneur I always love that when I see people from the community take a leap of faith start businesses all that truly differentiate and help customers achieve their end goals with this technology if
you want to find out more about the CTO advisor you can follow us on the web the ctoadvisor.com Josh how will people get ahead to end to end so you can just hit me up on Twitter Josh underscore udges odg ERS or e2ea.com um and you'll have end to end all right you want to ask me questions about how is this broadcom acquisition impacting the partner ecosystem the channel customers feel free DMS are open at CTO advisor on x.com until then talk to you next CTO
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