Pat Gelsinger leans on the channel for long-term growth

Pat Gelsinger (VMware)

Pat Gelsinger has made it clear that the Cloud Provider Program has established a "meaningful" area of revenue for VMware, with further investments planned in the future.

The pledge comes days after the tech giant reported that second-quarter profit and revenue beat analyst estimates, driven by strong demand from within its cloud services business.

The VMware Cloud Provider Program attributed more than 30 per cent to the vendor’s revenue stream, which rose 12.5 per cent to US$2.17 billion.

"There’s been a consistency to that area of our business that I think has shocked everyone," said Gelsinger, speaking as CEO of VMware. "There was a prevailing view in the industry that the big cloud guys - AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform will eat up everybody.

"The result has been an area of consistent and steady growth for us, and increasingly, we’re being seen as the technology source for all other clouds.

"Clearly the mega guys are building much of their own technology, but all of the other cloud providers are increasingly relying on VMware’s technologies as the base for building off their cloud."

Outlined during a press briefing with media from Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ), Gelsinger also addressed ways the tech giant intends to keep market momentum moving, through the increase of resources and a deepened focus on Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ).

"Particularly in APJ, we haven’t been as invested in that area, but in the last year and a half, we’ve increased our investments for that area of our business,” he said. "We have a good business in Australia, but that is the exception in APJ.

"We have started to build up more capacity to drive those businesses and some of the other countries such as China."

Most of that revenue in the past has been driven from vSphere, Gelsinger said and the offering was now gaining more traction for NSX, vSAN and vCloud Director.

"We’re also working to make that program, a great channel for other services,” Gelsinger said. “CloudHealth and VMC on AWS will be resold through those channels as well.

"We’ll be putting more of our products focus through that business relationship. That I believe will be the biggest aspect of our long term growth."

Gelsinger highlighted many areas of growth opportunities within network with NSX and storage with vSAN, saying VMware was just getting started.

"It’s been eight months since the acquisition of VeloCloud and depth of integration is still light compared to what we have on the roadmap, but the response is so far positive,” he added.