From VMware : Good News For Customers and Partners

VMware customers will see an announcement coming within the next two weeks making it more attractive to purchase current and future releases of VM management tools (Lab Manager, LifeCycle Manager, Storage Resource Manager. These products show VMware’s desire and ability to deliver management tools beyond the hypervisor.

As the hypervisor market becomes more crowded, VMware can demonstrate that they offer tools today that deal with some of the challenges created in a virtual environment ( server sprawl , performance problems, audit & compliance, and making the manual tasks of the creation, deployment and decommissioning of virtual machines more automated).

These new bundles will be priced aggressively making the purchase of these tools almost a "no-brainer" for many users.

VMware on Wednesday unveiled new partner bonuses at its partner meeting held in San Diego. VMware partners who sell VMware technology attached to products from a number of third-party vendors are eligible for new bonuses.

Bonuses will be paid by those vendors, not by VMware, under the new VMware Alliance Affiliate Initiative to participating VMware partners. The initial vendors in the program include CA , Dell , McAfee, NetApp, Riverbed Technology, and Vizioncore.

Including NetApp in this program is interesting considering that they are EMC's (VMware's largest stock holder) biggest competitor and NetApp has been getting closer to Citrix and XenServer, Xen Desktop.

New services will be offerered from VMware's top tier of service partners in the form of packaging VMware's professional services implementations and design and consulting intellectual property into collateral, training, and implementation guides. This will give VMware service partners the ability to leverage VMware expertise (following the purchase of Foedus of Portsmouth, NH) and let these partners brand services already developed by VMware.

The services offered will include chargeback (vKernel), configuration management (coming as the result of the acquisition of Dunes, and FDA compliance.(coming as the result of the purchase of Foedus - led in this area by the work done by former Foedus CTO John Dodge)