1. Microsoft & Partner Confidential. 2015 March.
Microsoft Corporate Accounts
Microsoft & Partner Confidential March.
Battlecard At-A-Glance: VMware
How To Win
If/Then
Understand customer’s pains, challenges, goals, & major initiatives. Build conversation around Microsoft’s modern platform: Windows Server, System Center and Azure.
Identify and select winning sales tactics and align them with solving key customer pains. Approach customers around specific workload scenarios where you have a significant competitive advantage.
Know and use your available resources e.g. POC and pilots and engage/escalate early with Microsoft if needed.
If Your Customer is Experiencing:
Then, You Should:
VMware lock-in. VMware’s rigid solution to standardize on their technology means customers may miss out on using better tools and technology.
Position that System Center 2012 R2 enables you to construct and manage clouds across multiple datacenters, multiple infrastructures, and environments such as VMware, Open Source, and bare metal. A single pane of glass management helps you monitor physical and virtual environments, on-premises, cloud and bare metal deployments.
VMware doesn’t own or operate their cloud. Because VMware doesn’t own or operate their cloud, customers will be forced into trusting a 3rd party who they potentially have had limited previous experience working with.
State that Microsoft offers a true hybrid platform and consistent experience across on-premises, Microsoft Azure public cloud, and a hosting service provider. The customer chooses their cloud roadmap and Microsoft supports them with a consistent platform and experience.
High VMware price tag. When it comes to products and services, customers want a consistent price without hidden costs that end up costing dearly as customers take advantages of the solution (e.g. NSX, vSphere).
State that Microsoft’s goes beyond simple virtualization with Windows Server and Systems Center this allows customers to take advantage of advanced features without having to buy additional functionality. Because there’s no need for expensive add-ons, businesses get a lower TCO and licensing than VMware.
What to Avoid?
Avoid technical conversations limited to the hypervisor. Make the conversation about the Cloud OS journey. Don’t talk solely with the IT Pro/VMware evangelists. They’re often pre-armed with tech blockers against Microsoft that may be old/incorrect.
Questions To Ask Your Customer
VMware’s Sales Tactics
Additional Resources
As Virtualization becomes a commodity and not an innovative advantage anymore, are you still ready to spend a significant amount of your IT budget on it?
By 2017, most businesses will run part of their Infrastructure on Cloud. How do you feel about having to rely on multiple vendors to deliver a hybrid cloud considering costs and compatibility risks of integrating them?
A cost-effective datacenter is well managed. Can you share your experience with infrastructure management?
Leverage a strong portfolio of advanced datacenter tools within the vCloud suite.
Drive perception that VMware has a Hybrid cloud strategy where engagement with hosting service providers could provide a network of global public cloud options for VMware customers.
Sustain a strong relationship with high-level technical decision makers (CIOs, IT decision makers and IT implementers) as well as a reputation for product leadership and innovation among IT professionals.
VMware in your account? Escalate to your partner contact at Microsoft!
CIE/MEC
Datacenter TCO Tool
Differentiated Value Propositions
Virtualization Squared
WhyMicrosoft & Azure Trust Center (public)
Disclaimer: The material contained within this presentation is Microsoft Confidential. Do not share, forward, or otherwise disseminate without the explicit written permission of Microsoft. The financial models and statements contained herein are provided to you for illustrative purposes only, and should not be considered or relied upon as the actual or potential income, sales, profits, or earnings which you will realize, in whole or in part, as a result of deployment of Microsoft products and technologies.

2. Microsoft & Partner Confidential. 2015 March.
Microsoft Corporate Accounts
Microsoft & Partner Confidential March.
Objection Handling: VMware
NOTE: If your customer has detailed objection escalate to your partner contact at Microsoft.
VMware delivers lower total operating costs than Hyper-V.
VMware’s hypervisor is only 144 megabytes in size, while Windows Server 2012 is 5 gigabytes in size.
When looking at the actual total cost of ownership (TCO) comparing recent product versions, it shows that VMware’s TCO can be up to four times that of Microsoft’s solution.
VMware is comparing its hypervisor product to an operating system, choosing to ignore the fact that Hyper-V (the hypervisor portion of Windows Server 2012) can be run on bare metal as a separate component, just like VMware’s hypervisor.
VMware has significantly lower provisioning times.
vSphere patches are virtually ‘nonexistent,’ allowing users to eliminate scheduled downtime.
With Windows Server 2012 R2, this is no longer the case. A report exists that VMware commonly cites. However, it was comparing VMware to an earlier version (Windows Server 2008 R2).
VMware’s claims are not backed by reality. VMware’s own “advisories and certifications” includes a long list of fixes to address “vulnerabilities” within vSphere. Microsoft offers “Cluster Aware Updating,” a free feature of Windows Server 2012 that enables automated patch management with no scheduled downtime.
VMware has a 20 to 25 percent virtual machine density advantage over Hyper-V.
This data was based on a VMware-commissioned report that compares vSphere 5.0 to Windows Server 2008 R2. Today, Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V supports double the number of active virtual machines per host that vSphere 5.5 Enterprise Plus supports.
Microsoft does not have a comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA) solution like VMware’s.
VMware has a ‘purpose-built hypervisor,’ while Microsoft’s solution depends on a general purpose OS.
Microsoft offers a comprehensive set of DR and high availability features included in Windows Server 2012 R2, such as Hyper-V Replica and enhancements to failover clustering. Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Manager and StorSimple are game changing solutions that give customers reliable, easy-to-configure services to help back up their data and data centers in the cloud.
With Windows Server 2012, customers get a tremendous value that includes powerful, leading-edge virtualization capabilities built into a platform that goes beyond hypervisors (storage, networking, and identity, etc.).
Disclaimer: The material contained within this presentation is Microsoft Confidential. Do not share, forward, or otherwise disseminate without the explicit written permission of Microsoft. The financial models and statements contained herein are provided to you for illustrative purposes only, and should not be considered or relied upon as the actual or potential income, sales, profits, or earnings which you will realize, in whole or in part, as a result of deployment of Microsoft products and technologies.