Remote Work Offers Opportunities to Strengthen Customer Outreach
“Since the pandemic hit, I have been so much more connected to customers than ever before, all across the globe,” Gelsinger said, estimating that he personally will have visited 500 customers virtually by the end of the year.
VMware’s enhanced online presence has provided it with more customer touchpoints than ever before, and Gelsinger sees that as an opportunity to continue to work more closely with customers. “We deliver the digital foundation for an increasingly unpredictable world,” he said.
Gelsinger specified five critical building blocks aligned with the core purchasing priorities of customer CIOs: app modernization, multicloud portfolios, digital workspace, virtual cloud networks and intrinsic security.
VMware’s tech offerings truly center on app modernization and multicloud, where the company is really able to enhance organizations through virtualization, he added. With a sustained focus on Software as a Service, VMware will move its focus from “selling products and supporting them to a broader focus on the full lifecycle of customer experience.”
As more customers turn to SaaS, VMware and other IT companies more closely align themselves to customer objectives and business outcomes. SaaS’ dependence on rich data, data analytics and AI deepens VMware’s engagement with customers and transforms relationships from a series of transactions to a full lifecycle journey.
“Retention becomes even more important than ever before,” Gelsinger said.
Pandemic Accelerates Digital Transformation for Better Business
On Feb. 28, VMware “flipped a switch” and moved from a physical workspace to a virtual workspace and never looked back, Gelsinger said.
That enabled a rapid transformation of the digital ecosystem, where the company has become closer to its customers but also closer to some competitors. Companies able to work together with VMware have become “coopetitors” rather than competitors, Gelsinger said, to the benefit of customers.
“We need to dramatically reshape the technology ecosystem in the name of the customer experience,” Gelsinger said.
As organizations pivot in service to customers, Gelsinger said, companies should focus on digital transformation, speed of delivery, transparency and understanding, and urgency to support an “anywhere workforce.”
“It’s been a fabulous year for acceleration of digital transformation,” he said.
In his session, Gelsinger fielded questions from CDW COO Christina Corley, who offered her own thoughts on supporting the transformation of the technology ecosystem: continue to keep focus on the customer, simplify the complex and remain agile.
“If we have learned nothing in this pandemic, it’s that we need to pivot sometimes. The more agile you are, the more you can pivot to where your customers need to go,” Corley said.
Follow BizTech’s full coverage of CDW Tech Talks here. Insiders can register for the event here.
