Health-Care Industry 'Ripe' For VMware Partners To Sell vSAN, Hyper-Converged Solutions

VMware is urging partners to target the health-care market as the industry is seeking to modernize data centers, transform security and integrate public clouds.

Frank Rauch, vice president of VMware's Americas Partner Organization, said the virtualization leader has all of the offerings – vSphere, vSAN and NSX – for partners to win health-care deals that typically come with a 5X drag for the channel.

"Whether it's hardware drag or software drag, you're turning a $22,000 [vSAN] sale into six figures," said Rauch during his keynote at XChange 2018, hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company. "Forty percent of customers are rebuying within eight months of their original purchase and they're rebuying at 140 percent of what they originally bought."

[Related: VMware, AWS Execs: 'Tremendous Momentum' For Partners Around VMware Cloud On AWS]

Rauch said VMware has over 500,000 vSphere customers and only 14,000 of those have purchased virtual storage or hyper-converged solutions. "You do the math. That's a lot of customers that remain as targets," he said. "The health-care industry is ripe."

George Pashardis, vice president and national leader of health care at solution provider powerhouse ePlus Technology, said the company's VMware health-care business has grown a whopping 1,400 percent in 2018 driven by Workspace ONE, NSX and cloud sales.

Pashardis said hospital CIOs are looking to strengthen their data security and analytics capabilities as well as patient satisfaction. VMware is one of the "very few vendors that truly has a health-care vertical," he added.

"We were able to certify most of our reps with Workspace ONE and do some test drives. Test drives are really important because you're guaranteed 40X to 50X in ROI," said Pashardis.

VMware’s approach to health care is to leverage virtualization and hyper-converged infrastructure to reduce hardware, manage through software, and achieve a hybrid-cloud-ready data center, according to Rauch. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based vendor's vast product set supports future cloud-based architectures, development platforms and ecosystem partners while also maintaining support of legacy applications.

VMware is enabling partners to go after the health-care market not only with offerings like VMware Cloud on AWS and AppDefense, but by providing the channel with leads and identifying targets based on its licensing data.

"We have a war room set up to be able to help you beat the competition," Rauch said. "We are doing everything to be able to enable the channel to grow even faster."