6 Big New VMware Partner Incentives, Trainings And Knights Improvements

VMware’s top global partner executives explain new channel incentives, training programs and investments that every VMware partner needs to know about.

VMware is heavily investing in partners with new outcome-based financial incentives around VCF and vSAN, making partner services entitlements available in the commercial space, launching a new Partner Technology Council, as well as hosting new events focused on training IT pros to quickly become VMware experts.

“Broad brush, we’re rewarding the partners for getting much deeper in their capabilities,” said Brian Moats, VMware by Broadcom’s global channel chief.

“We’re rewarding them for expansion now, like new workloads coming to the platform—not just repatriation—but modern new workloads coming on VKS [VMware Kubernetes Services],” he said. “Then advanced services like vDefend and Avi, which are much more relevant today than they were a year ago.”

Moats said there’s friction with businesses around legacy hardware “hitting the wall,” public cloud costs increasing and how to have successful AI outcomes.

“Businesses are going to have to make some changes and do some modernization with applications. They are rethinking the economics of the placement of their workloads,” said Moats, senior vice president of Global Commercial Sales and Partners.

“Partners need to work with these customers on the friction points, the trade-offs and create a plan,” he said. “So we’re investing a lot with those partners.”

Ryan Sheehan, senior vice president of Advanced Solutions at SHI International, praised VMware’s support for partners.

“VMware is showing that they’re 100 percent committed to partners like us,” he said.

“There’s more access, there’s more previews, there’s great technical training for our technical teams, there’s great field alignment with the sales leaders because it takes a lot of the historic channel conflict out when everybody knows we’re on the same kind of mission,” he said.

‘We Need Our Partners’

Broadcom’s infrastructure software group, which includes VMware, generated $8.75 billion in revenue during the company’s third fiscal quarter of 2026.

This represents a 29 percent growth rate year over year for Broadcom’s VMware software group.

“Our mission is pretty clear,” Laura Falko, VMware by Broadcom’s partner program leader, told CRN.

“Let’s go execute together and continue to engage with us,” Falko said. “We need our partners. We’re in this together.”

In an interview with CRN, VMware’s global channel leaders Moats and Falko explain six big partner incentives, programs and investments that every VMware partner should know about.

New Life-Cycle And Outcome-Based Incentives vSAN, VKS And Security

Falko (pictured) said VMware is starting to shift from transaction-based incentives, such as back-end rebates, to outcome-based incentives.

“We’re going to keep back-end rebates in place because those are still important to the partner’s business,” she said.

“But we’re layering on to that life-cycle and outcome-based incentives. So we announced that at VMware Explore for our commercial segment,” Falko said.

“So these incentives will be focused around storage, primarily the vSAN product, containers with VKS [vSphere Kubernetes Service],” she said. “And on the security side, vDefend and Avi Lead Balancer.”

For VDefend and Avi products, “we have a very lucrative rebate program in place for the transaction,” she said. “So what we’re trying to do with those incentives is really displace competition.

“Setting up a container is huge. Making sure that the container is set up correctly, and then bringing in a very important application to that customer into that container—and letting the customer see the value of that—sets it up for expansion success,” she said.

“Today, it’s about really putting VCF to work, driving those customer outcomes, and rewarding the partners at each step of that deployment and outcome-based life cycle,” Falko said.

Knights Requirement Removed From Premier Tier; Knights-Only Event Series

The Broadcom Knights Program recognizes VMware’s elite partners that show advanced sales and technical skills.

“We’re removing the Knights requirement from our Premier Tier and from our Services Partner requirements,” said Falko.

“This is not because Knights are not important, but because they are absolutely important. What we found this past year is that when we had a programmatic requirement that dictated a certain number of Knights individuals, it was impacting quality,” she said.

“And that’s the opposite of what we want to do with the Knights. So we are removing that barrier or that requirement,” she added.

On the Knights program front, “we are giving the Knights more access to our internal folks, and we’re training them with the same content that we train our own internal [system engineers],” Falko said. “We’re also creating a Knights-only event series that is separate from the rest of the practitioner training that we’re doing.”

New Partner Technology Council For The Americas

VMware has launched a new Partner Technology Council in the Americas for the first time.

Falko said the Partner Technology Council differs from VMware’s Executive Partner Advisory Board, which mostly consists of CEOs and CIOs.

“What we were missing was that space in between the CTOs that live within the specific practices around storage and security and containers that aren’t Broadcom-specific or VMware-specific, that are multi-vendor, and they have a lot of the answers that we are interested in having conversations around,” Falko said.

“Together, we’re collaborating with our business units, with our professional services folks, the partners, and all experts in the room to better understand what’s going on and how do we work together to deliver better customer outcomes together,” she said.

At Explore, the Partner Technology Council was launched with initial sessions focused on security, storage and containers.

New VCF Challenge Labs And Fast Tracks Trainings

Specifically for VCF, VMware is introducing Challenge Labs.

These VCF labs are performance-based technical tests and interactive tournaments via VMware’s Hands-On Labs platform.

Moats (pictured) said VMware is investing in partners that worked with customers on friction points around repatriation workloads and on-premises AI applications.

“For the partners aren’t quite there yet, we’re significantly ramping up our investment in the Hands-On Labs events, locally in-country and all around the world,” said Moats.

“The partners have hired most of the really good, experienced VCF people, but there’s still more demand. So how do you train people fast enough with the right level of experience to go take customers where they need to go?” he said. “That’s what these labs are all about.”

VMware also launched new Fast Track courses, which are accelerated training programs designed for experienced professionals who need to learn advanced virtualization and cloud concepts in a short amount of time.

“Because we want to stay agile with things changing very quickly, we’re introducing a new set of training called Fast Tracks,” Falko said.

“It will be given exclusively first to our Knights because that’s the cream of our crop in terms of our technical capability ecosystem of individuals,” she said.

Partner Service Entitlements Now Available In Commercial

VMware’s Services Entitlements are bundled professional services for VCF purchases that only partners can provide.

“This is where we book a transaction and we take a portion of the software TCV [total contract value] and we reinvest that into service entitlements—which only our partners can deliver those services—and we fund it,” said Moats.

“That existed before but mostly in strategic and top end of corporate, but this year we expanded that down into other segments and into the top end of commercial,” he said. “Some partners really appreciated that because many of our partners also serve mid-market and SMB.

Heading into 2027, Moats said VMware is “expanding it even further.”

New Events For Training To Be ‘Customer-Ready’

Falko said solution providers say VMware is asking partners to do more than ever before.

“And they can’t just go out into the marketplace and really hire the skill set that we need,” she said. “So they need more enablement, more training, more access to our SMEs, our engineering teams—so that they’re not just certified but they’re customer-ready.”

“So what we've done is we have doubled the amount of Activate events that we’re doing for FY 27. We’ve added a new track of practitioner event called Activate Expert, and we are doing that in partnership with our VMware PSO [Professional Services Organization],” she said.

VMware wants to provide partners with direct access and frameworks around “what we know works in terms of plays for professional services and delivery quicker. We’re giving them more access to hands-on labs,” Falko said.