Customer-for-life Mindsets: and How Partners Can Lead the Way

The demands of running an IT organisation have transformed significantly in recent years. The race to innovate has continued to accelerate, driven by consumers’ changing demands for enhanced experiences, and enterprises’ exploration of alternative business models.

More recently, AI has undoubtedly been the biggest catalyst for these changes, and a timely reminder of innovation’s integral role in powering business success. Beyond the day-to-day experimentation from consumers, customers everywhere are hunting for ways to yield AI's benefits, increasing their appetite for more scalable infrastructure that allows them to modernise, optimise and deploy apps rapidly.

These apps are the most effective route to delivering pioneering AI-powered experiences. But due to the complex terrain of budget cuts, combined with growing demand for tailored experiences, many businesses lack the skills and platforms required to adapt their infrastructure to newer methods of consumption.

Broadcom’ ecosystem of partners plays a critical role in breeding excellence, and solving these complex challenges for customers. As well as helping organisations deliver on their transformation goals and simplify their IT environments, partners must pride themselves on delivering maximum value in a shorter space of time, and at a time when demand for innovation is at an all-time high.

That said, we know our partners need a simpler, easier, and more profitable way of developing and embedding best-in-class solutions and services. That opportunity can come from teaming up with a vendor that can lead with their specialist skillsets and expertise, while keeping the partner abreast of ways to infuse modern technologies. A vendor thrives to forge long-lasting relationships and will go out of their way to understand and provide value to their customers.

There are a number of ways in which Broadcom’s partner programme is evolving to deliver on these needs and truly encapsulate what it means to be customer-centric.

Forming true, lasting partnerships

It’s our role as vendors to work consistently and collaboratively with partners to find the best solutions for the community – those that empower customers to innovate not only with technology, but also the way they consume it. We have made changes to our programme that have been carefully considered to optimise the core strengths that customers value, and enable partners to collaborate by introducing a manageable and cohesive private cloud platform. Customers should have their cloud footprint customised to meet their respective objectives.

We want to be a part of that journey – and a journey is exactly what it is. Transformation is never a one-and-done process, so we want to make it easier for our partners to embrace a customer-for-life mindset, while also benefiting from more consistent profitability through a shift towards more flexible managed services and consumption-based models.

Radical simplification

A customer-for-life mindset also means equipping organisations with the foundations to capitalise on emerging trends, and to continue realising value from their technology investments as they do so. Simplicity is an important pillar here. There are customers out there with convoluted portfolios of multiple tools and platforms, many of which are likely the sources of inefficiencies. That’s a big reason why we incentivise a streamlined portfolio that consolidates multiple functions and reduces the need for several different subscriptions, which could be wasteful.

These changes have been purposefully made so our partners are poised to profit. We want to actively keep complexities low so customers are spending less time, effort, and budget on ongoing maintenance and updates. In turn, partners can refocus resources on embedding AI-enabled applications and increasing the volume of AI and Generative AI workloads. Our steer to managed services and consumption-based models offers much-needed flexibility to customers who stand to gain from having greater control of their usage. Empowering customers to simplify and optimise their stack will translate into higher satisfaction, increased loyalty, and above all, deeper relationships.

Celebrating partner specializations

There are clear avenues that partners can explore to succeed in delivering improved outcomes to customers. Above all, however, the most successful customer outcomes we see are those where partners come together to deliver a seamless experience, with each playing a key role and exhibiting different expertise at various steps of the project lifecycle. Having that distinction gives each partner the opportunity to showcase their respective value proposition – relaying to customers exactly how their business needs are being met – and raise the overall technical bar.

Future-proofing the partner ecosystem

We’re striving to give our partners the means, guidance, and expertise to provide value across all stages of that customer lifecycle, notably to capitalise on the Generative AI wave and help customers stand out in a challenging climate. Streamlining day-to-day processes, simplifying interactions, and reducing overheads are three core elements that will help partners achieve that. Broadcom is making a pivotal shift towards a more focused partner ecosystem; one that paves the way for enhanced innovation for customers, and helps us deliver value, together.