The award is part of the annual VMware Partner Achievement Awards, which recognize exceptional partners globally for their achievements using VMware products and solutions innovatively to solve business challenges and address pressing needs.

As vice president of the Softchoice’s Cloud Business Unit, Chris Woodin sets the company’s market strategy for cloud and oversees its solutions and services development, pre-sales efforts, and go-to-market. He also forges strong alliances with partners like VMware that further Softchoice’s goal of enabling customers to adopt cloud and workplace technologies.

Woodin says that customers recently have been engaging Softchoice to help them adopt multi-hybrid-cloud and workplace solutions. He shared his thoughts on how Softchoice and VMware are supporting these customers to help them succeed.

Focused on Business Outcomes

Softchoice’s focus is squarely on the success of its customers’ organizations and their IT professionals. Woodin says, “We’re helping our customers win with their customers and their people. We do this by understanding what outcomes they’re trying to achieve, and how technology can help them solve their biggest challenges and capitalize on their most important opportunities.”

Woodin sees VMware as a key enabler of this strategy, noting that VMware technology “glues together our entire solution strategy, whether enabling customers to adopt hybrid (and/or) multi-cloud solutions, all the way to modernizing applications and developing cloud native.” He believes that no other partner empowers them to complete the entire cloud journey with their customers as VMware does.

Woodin observes that many of Softchoice’s customers may be traditional organizations with legacy systems and processes that they want to include in their move to cloud. Yet they often lack in-house skills in cloud-native capabilities. VMware technologies enable Softchoice to address this challenge. “VMware Cloud, as an example, is a great way to leverage the skills and systems that our customers are already familiar with while they accelerate their journey to the cloud.”

With VMware Cloud, Softchoice can give the customer a known environment in which to begin building the new modern applications that the customer envisions leading to business success.

Enabling a Customer to Hit a Homerun

Woodin points to a Major League Baseball team in the United States as an example of a traditional organization that wanted to modernize its infrastructure to deliver an amazing fan experience. That experience included the ability to order food and beverages from their seats and see player stats and watch instant replays on mobile devices.

They turned to Softchoice to launch the team’s journey to the cloud. Their current technology infrastructure and apps could not support their vision for the fan experience they wanted to offer. They had a lot of technical debt and challenges specific to the ballpark experience.

Using VMware Cloud, Softchoice helped the team realize their vision in a hybrid cloud environment that included building modern apps in the public cloud, but hosting and delivering them locally through private cloud infrastructure at the stadium. The close proximity of the in-stadium infrastructure enables the real-time responses that fans demand.

Woodin says, “All of this is managed by VMware Cloud. What it ultimately means is that the customer is now in a position to very quickly build and launch new applications locally delivered in the ballpark, including the ability for fans to order concessions and memorabilia directly to their seat and watch replays in real time. But most importantly, this new environment has given the ball club the ability to constantly innovate and deploy new applications as the season goes on.”

Beyond delivering a fantastic fan experience and providing for agile development in the cloud, the team has the added benefit of reduced costs for on-premises infrastructure, operations, and licensing.

The Next Phase of Digital Transformation

Woodin observes that customers are already seeking “the automation of everything” to scale, and to do so more quickly and with less risk because automation facilitates adherence to standard policies and processes. Typically, these companies already have on-premises environments built on VMware solutions. They want to accelerate their migration to the cloud with VMware Cloud, whether public, private, or both, as was the case with the baseball team.

“Once we migrate these workloads to the cloud,” Woodin says, “VMware has made it really easy to think about how we can help the customer to modernize them over time through the VMware Tanzu platform.” VMware Tanzu can automate the security and delivery of containerized workloads. It can also automate security and compliance for apps across development teams.

Woodin explains that the whole VMware portfolio with its security and networking capabilities provides “everything we need to complete this digital transformation experience for our customers using a technology they're already comfortable with.”

Investing in a Partnership to Serve Customers

Woodin appreciates the significant investment VMware has made in partners like Softchoice. He says, “This year, we won VMware's Partner of the Year award. It would not have been possible without the investments VMware made in developing our capabilities and the support they gave to us in bringing these advanced capabilities to more customers.”

He concludes, “Doing new things big and fast means that you're going to learn a lot quickly. We've got a great partner in VMware who's willing to join us on that journey. It's been a great partnership.”

At VMware, we share Woodin’s sentiment—it has been and continues to be a strong partnership. Congratulations to Softchoice for its award-winning work with our joint customers.

Stay tuned for more spotlights on our 2022 VMware Partner Achievement Award winners just like this one. Interested in becoming a VMware Partner? Learn about the VMware Partner Connect program. Looking for a VMware Partner like Softchoice? Find one using our Partner Locator. Then learn how VMware Principal Partners can help drive your business success.

Check out the Packet Pusher’s podcast interview featuring Chris Woodin, VP, Cloud Business Unit at Softchoice and the VMware Partnership Perspectives podcast episode featuring Andrew Caprara, COO at Softchoice.