Here’s Why Softchoice Won VMware’s Partner Of The Year
‘We experienced extraordinary growth in our VMware business last year, but equally important is actually the transformation of our VMware business,’ says Softchoice’s Chris Woodin.
Solution provider standout Softchoice has won VMware’s 2022 Worldwide Partner of the Year award, besting thousands of channel partners thanks to its multi-cloud and modern applications strategy with VMware Cross-Cloud services.
Chris Woodin, vice president of Softchoice’s Cloud Business Unit, told CRN that his company is placing its hybrid, multi-cloud bets on VMware and CEO Raghu Raghuram.
“We believe very strongly in VMware’s solutions strategy to enable multi-cloud adoption for all organizations, especially those that are looking to leverage skills and processes that they’ve already built up for many years on VMware, and then pivot customers into a modernization strategy—that strategy is very well aligned to our own,” said Woodin, who’s been with the Toronto-based company for over 16 years.
Softchoice is also betting on VMware’s partner strategy led by global channel chief Sandy Hogan, as the virtualization and multi-cloud software superstar transitions from selling traditional software licenses to consumption-based, software as-a-service (SaaS) subscriptions.
[Related: Intel’s 6 Most Highly Compensated Execs; Pat Gelsinger Leads]
“We experienced extraordinary growth in our VMware business last year, but equally important is actually the transformation of our VMware business,” he said. “It’s less and less dependent on traditional perpetual licensing of data center technologies, and more based on shifting to consumption-based subscription solutions as customers are leveraging VMware Cloud technologies in the cloud.”
VMware said Softchoice stands on top as the channel partner of the year in 2022 because it delivers the “most customer value and impact to customers businesses”, both from an IT and business process perspective.
VMware Cross-Cloud Services
One of the major reasons why Softchoice was able to win the 2022 Worldwide Partner of the Year award is due to the company’s highly successful VMware Cross-Cloud services capabilities.
Launched at VMware 2021, the new Cross-Cloud services is an integrated portfolio of SaaS solutions to build, run, manage and secure any application across any cloud.
“The importance of the Cross-Cloud services is understanding that customers don’t want lots of different point solutions for different parts of their cloud transformation journey. They want to be able to work on one integrated platform, and that’s what VMware is essentially creating,” said Woodin. “Softchoice has really embraced that. So we’re able to use the VMware platform at nearly any stage of a customer’s journey in cloud—whether it’s assessing where the right workload needs to be placed; migrating that workload into the cloud as we would with VMC; managing that workload through services like CloudHealth; and ultimately providing security around the entire solution. So we think it’s a really strong strategy and plays very well into the solution offerings Softchoice is bringing to market.”
Softchoice Trusts Raghu Raghuram’s Vision
VMware’s longtime executive and engineering guru, Raghu Raghuram, took over the CEO role in June, 2021, with plans to make VMware the “Switzerland of multi-cloud.”
Softchoice believes Raghuram not only has a great vision for the company, but can sucessfull executive on that vision as well.
“No matter who you talk to at VMware, no matter what function they’re in, they are entirely focused on establishing themselves as a hybrid, multi-cloud leader, enabling customers to then modernize applications. We think he’s doing a great job and we’re very bullish,” said Woodin. “I would also say that the rest of the ecosystem is very bullish as well on VMware.”
VMware’s Other Channel Partner Award Winners
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company unveiled this week several other 2022 VMware partner award winners.
Xtravirt won VMware’s 2022 Worldwide Partner Lifecycle Services Award due to its ability to create ongoing value across the entire customer lifecycle. Google Cloud won the Worldwide VMware Cloud Innovation & Transformation Award.
In terms of North American channel partner award winners: Ahead won VMware’s Partner Cloud Innovation & Transformation award for helping customers move to cloud-centric architectures and advancing their digital transformation journey.
World Wide Technology won VMware’s Partner Industry award for North America, due to WWT’s success within specific industries.
Insight won VMware’s Partner Value award in North America, thanks to driving growth and ROI with VMware solutions.
CDW was VMware’s Partner Collaboration award winner due to working collaboratively with other partners to deliver high-value solutions to customers.
Rackspace won VMware’s Partner Lifecycle Services award for North America due to growing its long-term customer-partner relationships and increasing customer satisfaction.
Carahsoft won VMware’s Partner Social Impact award in North America for positively impacting the world through the use of VMware technologies.
“VMware’s success, now and in the future, is closely tied to delivering a partner-led, profit-driven, cloud-smart ecosystem,” said Sandy Hogan, senior vice president of VMware’s Worldwide Partner and Commercial Organization in a statement. “We are excited to recognize partners for delivering services excellence and impact across the entire customer lifecycle. Our partners are uniquely positioned to help customers unlock the full potential of multi-cloud.”