Words Of Wisdom: 10 Hot Topics From CRN's Channel Chief Roundtable

Channel Growth

Frank Rauch, vice president, Americas Partner Organization, VMware

We are seeing a little bit of a barbell model. We are seeing growth at the top and kind of growth at the bottom. The guys I would be worried about are more the guys in the middle, people that have lived off of five or 10 larger accounts and maybe don't really have the demand generation engine, But we are seeing that basically smaller companies in the SMB space still want to buy from very local buyers. We see that some mergers and acquisitions are happening. But the trick for us is really how do we service the breadth of partners and then how do we drive preference at some of the larger partners, and then basically how do we consult on new business models, whether it be cloud, mobility or BYOD, to be able to help them develop into those markets.