Platform9 wants resellers to help customers leave VMware, and it is paying to recruit them. The company has launched RISE, a U.S. partner program that offers margins of up to 30%, depending on geography. Partners can also sell their own migration, implementation and managed services alongside Platform9’s Private Cloud Director.
The program arrives as many organizations weigh alternatives to VMware after Broadcom reshaped its licensing and partner programs. RISE follows a separate Platform9 program for cloud providers that run VMware infrastructure. This one targets a different audience: resellers and integrators who sell software and then help customers move and run their workloads.
Structure is simple on purpose. Platform9 uses a single partner model, and it has streamlined deal registration, so resellers can log opportunities without climbing through program tiers. For small integrators, fewer tiers means less paperwork before the first deal.
Still, a margin on software is only part of the picture. The bigger money, and the bigger risk, sits in the services. A reseller can charge for moving workloads and for managing the new environment afterward. However, it must also price engineering time, customer support and any stretch when two platforms run side by side. Underpricing that overlap can turn a nice margin into a loss.
Platform9 has named only the ceiling. It hasn’t said which U.S. deals earn the full 30%, or whether the same terms apply at renewal. Partners should ask both questions before they build a business case.
Compatibility matters just as much. Platform9 designed Private Cloud Director to keep familiar virtualization workflows intact as customers leave older platforms. For a reseller writing a quote, the practical question is how much of the existing setup survives the move. If backup, storage or networking integrations need rebuilding, the labor estimate can climb sharply before a single workload moves.
My reading: RISE is a sensible offer for integrators who already do migration work, since it adds a product to services they sell anyway. For everyone else, the first step is a small pilot with a real customer. A pilot reveals the hidden costs faster than any partner brochure.
