So far the Microsoft efforts to push Hyper-V have been primarily focused on changing the customers perspective about its hypervisor. But now the company has begun addressing sales partners. And it’s doing that in a completely new way.
Last week in fact, David Greschler, Director of Virtualization Strategy at Microsoft, published a call-to-action on the company’s partner network channel, directly mentioning competition with VMware:
Every partner knows about the great opportunity to sell virtualization technology and services. For a while, that meant one thing: working exclusively with VMware.
Times have changed.
The statement is remarkable as it openly admits that so far Microsoft virtualization platforms have not been a real alternative for solution providers.
The tone is radically different from the one it uses to address customers. Not only the company is confirming that VMware has been the only way to do profit in virtualization business until today, but it also suggest to offer Hyper-V and ESX side by side rather than replacing VMware hypervisor with Microsoft one:
Nearly every VMware partner we talk to recognizes that Microsoft is a major player in virtualization and tells us they would like an opportunity to build a virtualization practice that includes both VMware and Microsoft. They recognize that having a dual practice allows them to become more trusted advisors to their customers. But they want a way to better understand the economic model.
Even better, Microsoft admits that VMware’s projects generate more revenue in short term for medium business:
As much as we’d like to tell you otherwise, if you plug in the numbers to look at your work on a project by project basis, the numbers could favor VMware. But if you take a practice-level view and look at the numbers over the long term, the tool is likely to show partners making far more money with Microsoft.
Despite all of that, Microsoft prepared a Virtualization Partner Profitability Toolkit, suggesting that because Hyper-V solutions costs 3-5 times less than VMware ones, partners can sell more and have more follow-up opportunities selling all the other products Microsoft offers for data center.
