VMware announced the findings of a survey conducted amongst its channel partners across Asia Pacific, exploring business outlooks and technology priorities for 2012. The results revealed that a majority (63%) of channel partners surveyed in India expect business growth and expansion in 2012, compared to a regional average of 45%.
VMware channel partners in India reported their top three business priorities for 2012 as — attracting new customers (76%), developing innovative offerings for current customers (67 %) and business transformation and process improvements (46%). Partners also indicated that IT/ITeS (75%), banking and financial services (62%) and manufacturing (53%) are the three most important industry verticals to their businesses.
“The survey results suggest that our partners anticipate growth and expansion in 2012 and that their customers’ investments in technology will enable them to advance on their journey to their cloud in the year ahead,” said Ganesan Arumugam, Director, Channels & Alliances, VMware India.
From a given list, partners surveyed believed that the most important role of IT over the next 18 months will be to drive increased efficiency and productivity (32%). The majority of respondents identified cloud computing (84%) as one of the technology trends which will have the greatest impact on the business, followed by mobility (66%) and changing risk and security landscape (40%). More than half (51%) of the respondents agreed that desktop virtualization is the top technology investment priority for customers, followed by cloud computing (48 %) and virtualization for data center consolidation (48%).
Supporting the trends toward cloud computing, respondents cited potential growth in 2012 in the areas of server and data center virtualization (97%), desktop virtualization (94%) and modernizing applications for the cloud (87%). The Partner Pulse Survey 2012 was conducted by VMware to understand the business outlook for the year ahead amongst channel partners. A total of 612 channel partners, including 93 from India, were surveyed across Asia-Pacific early in 2012.