New VMware Executive Vice President of North American Partner Sales Frank Rauch Tuesday urged UBM Channel's BoB Conference attendees not to be swayed by lower-margin alternatives and to instead double down on VMware as the centerpiece of a software-defined data center strategy.

Rauch told partners grappling with making the cloud computing transition to adopt VMware's software-defined data center product portfolio as the centerpiece of their cloud offerings and take advantage of new VMware margin-rich programs, including 10 additional margin points for investing in new VMware competencies -- which includes Management, Infrastructure as a Service, Business Continuity, Infrastructure Virtualization and Virtualization of Business Critical Apps -- and 10 additional margin points for new customer wins. "In a world where margins are shrinking, to be able to get access to 20 plus points of margin is absolutely a big deal," said Rauch.

"Understand what is going on in terms of deal reg, profitability, margins, etc.," asserted Rauch, charging that unnamed competitors are going to market with thin margins for partners. "You can't make any money with these guys!"

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"If you believe in this software-defined data center strategy, if you believe that is really the way the industry is going, consider VMware to be the center of that strategy rather than the side of that strategy," said Rauch. "If you are looking at other private cloud management systems or hypervisors, etc., understand where the money is going to be made, understand where the services-rich model is, understand where the hardware drag is going to occur that really play into that space rather than play with somebody that may want to take you well beyond that space [into public cloud]."

VMware's stepped up partner incentives, including a recent move to reduce the minimum deal registration threshold from a $10,000 minimum to only a $6,000 minimum, which comes as Microsoft is winning praise for its Microsoft Server 2012 with its Hyper-V virtualization platform. The new Microsoft product expands support for processors, memory and active virtual machines (VMs) per host.

Microsoft says that Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V now has support for 320 logical processors per host and 4 TB of physical memory per host compared to 160 logical processors and 32 GB and 2 TB respectively for VMware ESXi 5.0 and VMware vSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus. What's more, Microsoft says that Windows Server 2012 supports 1,024 VMs per host compared with 512 for VMware ESXi 5.0 and VMware VSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus.

Hugh Sazegar, president and CEO of Techcess Group, a fast growing Houston, Texas-based solution provider that partners with both Microsoft and VMware, said he sees Microsoft making progress with Hyper-V, but stressed that VMware has an absolutely stellar product with an unmatched track record.

"We chose VMware for one main reason: their stability," said Sazegar. "They have been very successful with Fortune 100 companies and enterprise-level customers. We have implemented VMware for four years, and it is extremely stable. We haven't had one single failure in the past four years. We have implemented VMware for 200 customers and thousands of users and have not had one single failure."

PUBLISHED OCT. 16, 2012