 Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021. My name is Dave Vellante, and right now we're going to dig into the powerful go-to-market and partner network trends within the VMware ecosystem. Sandy Hogan is here. She leads Worldwide Commercial and Partner Sales. Hello, Sandy, welcome. Good to see you. Great to see you, Dave. Thanks for having me today. Well, it's really our pleasure. We're always excited to cover VMworld, virtual, of course, this year of second year in a row. Now you joined VMware right after the lockdown. So you've been with the company now about 18 months. Was that difficult starting out completely virtual? Such a huge scope of responsibility. And how did you handle that with your team and the partner ecosystem? Oh, it's actually one of the most common questions actually that I get even on a daily basis still. So yes, I started VMware completely virtual. And mind you, I'm based in Chicago. And as you know, our headquarters is based in Palo Alto. Ironically, I would say it actually gave me a little bit of an advantage. And here's why. Because when we're such a distributed workforce anyway before COVID hit, you have people who are in meetings who are in one room, right? In a conference room and those of us, sit on a virtual Zoom or another mechanism somewhere else. So by joining virtually during the COVID era, it actually leveled the playing field because it allowed me to meet with everybody via video in their homes. It allowed, albeit virtual, eye-to-eye contact. And that actually made some of the onboarding easier. But by no means does it replace at all the personal interaction that's so critical. Well, plus me in the middle part of the country, I think, is, well, I'm a East Coast and we're kind of primarily a West Coast firm. So I'm in early. People don't like it when I call them super early, but I get calls, you know, 10 o'clock at night. So I think that's maybe another advantage. When you think about VMworld 2021, what were your objectives? I'm specifically interested, based on what you learned last year, how you thought about 2021, what will you must have features of the event? Talk about your role in shaping the event this year and your specific contributions. Sure. So, you know, I think a really big shift as you think about VMworld this year and truly becoming this multi-cloud provider, the role of the partner in this new world is more important than ever. And I think in the past, you know, candidly, it's been more about the technology centricity and then figuring out how we attach partners to that. At the core of this is really around delivering customer for life value and the role that partners play throughout that entire life cycle becomes critical in helping our customers jointly become successful in this multi-cloud world. So as the partner chief of VMware and you're really transformationally leading and driving that partner ecosystem evolution, how do you see the next two to three years? What would you say are your top priorities? Sure. So I think it's important to know, you know, especially with the pandemic, but I think it's fair to say, not only our transformation, our transformation is also a result of our partner's transformation. I can't think of a partner who I have met with in the last 12 months alone who has not gone through dramatic change where they're expanding their business models, expanding their capabilities to respond and be proactive in this environment. And so everybody is trying to figure out how to become more relevant and help customers through this, you know, multi-cloud digital transformation. And so that's what I reference around a delivering customer for life value. And most of the premise in our transformation, we've been primarily transaction oriented and everything about this new world is about moving to an influence deploy and consume motion, which is pretty significant. And that's also about creating a consumerized experience for our partners to bring value wherever they see fit based on where the customer is in their maturity. And in the end, our partners are really enabling our customers to become cloud smart. And in order to do that, we've actually focused on three key priorities in our partner transformation and evolution. First is really around leading with a partner led services motion for influence deploy and consume. We see that more partners are playing key advisory roles in helping customers become cloud smart and determine their roadmap, the timing of the roadmap and what they will implement and when and customer success is a critical element of that. And so that means how we help partners create new capabilities, new certifications and helping them maximize the investments that they're already making. So that's very essential in core to our strategy. Second is embedding VMware into the DNA of our partner solutions in a scaled motion. So this really means how we formally jointly innovate with our partners, enabling our partners to build their solutions, their unique IP on top of our cross-cloud services. And that means anything like solution labs, self-serve, business innovation, expansion of marketplaces and enabling partners to have another method to transact and offer their solutions. And all of this in the construct of becoming much more use case-based. So really thinking through, as we all know, our customers don't want bespoke independent technology. They want solutions that are going to solve their business problems. And so we're really adapting and accelerating the way that we help partners build that partner maturity, practice development and also how we enable that partner to partner acceleration. Because we know in this world today, no one can sell or deliver value alone. And so it's really about how the partners work together and how we enable and accelerate that in a whole new way that we've not done in the past. And so it's really opening up just tremendous opportunities, Dave, that brings unique skill sets and unique scale for our partners. Wow. I mean, thank you, Sandy, for such a substantive answer. I want to respond a couple of ways. One is hearing you talk about how your partners have transformed. I was talking to one of your partners at the end of last year and he said to me, Dave, two things. Did you ever think you'd become an expert in COVID? I was like, no. And the second thing he said, did you ever think that you would forget in one year more than you ever knew about digital transformation? And I think those were two, I mean, the first one is like, wow, never. But the second point is everybody talks about the acceleration, but wow, we were sort of forced into it and learned a lot. And now we're stepping back and being a little bit more planful. And then the other thing that strikes me is when you talked about joint innovation with your partners, because kind of early part of last decade, the VMware ecosystem, it was about making it kind of work, the plumbing of getting recovery to work or storage APIs. And now you're talking about a layer of innovation that is going to be much deeper business integration. And that's exciting. Yes, it is so exciting. And what's incredible about it is our customers jointly benefit the most from this because our customers are living a very complex world. I've been in the technology space for a long time and I had titles in my role description that were all around digital transformation over a decade ago. So that's how long many of us have been talking about it, but that complexity has not allowed many of our customers to transform. And so with this evolution of really being, helping our customers be cloud smart, it is forcing all of us in how we work together to bring those solutions in a much more digestible consumable way that I think is more meaningful and more exciting than it's ever been, frankly. Now, I want to ask you, this November marks a big milestone for the company. You've had many milestones, of course, VMware has, but you will once again be completely untethered from a governance standpoint and you'll be a purely standalone company. And for the partner ecosystem, I think that's almost a rejuvenation of one of the defining tenets of VMware, the value that's created for customers by partners. What impact do you see the spin having on the partner ecosystem? Well, you know, what's great about, I think the opportunity we have is certainly it gives, you know, flexibility for both parties in our expansion in ecosystem and who we work with. Our strategic partnership is going to be more strategic than ever. And also it's important to note, we share a very robust ecosystem together. And so our partners will continue to be able to leverage the best of Dell and the best of VMware as we continue to jointly solve our customer business problems together. Great, so it's, you don't see it as a radical change. It's more of an evolutionary, and so that's great too. So it's not disruptive. Well, Sandy, great to have you on theCUBE, the best of luck and look forward to hopefully seeing you face to face in the near future. Oh, wouldn't that be nice? I have not met many people face to face, Dave, so that would be fantastic. It was great being on here today, thank you. You're very welcome and thank you everybody for watching. Keep it right there, more great coverage from theCUBE at VMworld 2021.