Post Personnel Shake-Ups, Nutanix Elevate Emphasizes a ‘Channel-Friendly Company’
Christian Alvarez came to Nutanix a year ago with an ambitious goal: Turn the cloud computing company’s channel program into one partners would wholeheartedly embrace. With Nutanix Elevate, he hopes to have done just that.
Alvarez, the company’s global channel chief, put Nutanix Elevate into action after four months of intense internal and field work.
“We wanted to start our new fiscal year with some great news and innovation at our … .Next event,” he told Channel Futures.
Whether partners are as enthusiastic as Alvarez is still a bit on the TBD side.
“Nutanix has always struggled with their partner programs,” René van den Bedem, master architect and strategist for modern data center at MSP RoundTower, told Channel Futures. “I think Elevate is a step in the right direction; they have the right idea, but it will come down to execution before it can be judged as being successful.”
Miguel Reyes is perhaps a bit more optimistic.
“Nutanix is listening to the partners in the field,” said Reyes, commercial director of Mexico City-based IT consultancy JustOne Solutions. “Any healthy business relationship needs the commitment from both parties. Nutanix reinforces the benefits to partners who focus on developing their capabilities and sales process.”
For his part, Alvarez remains upbeat.
“We need to invest where we’ve fallen short,” he said, repeating a mantra he has maintained since arriving at Nutanix. Nutanix Elevate, he added, “will yield [partners] more earnings potential with clarity and predictability and simplicity, and we suspect we’re going to see a surge of new partners.”
Nutanix Elevate: Not About the Biggest or Most Profitable Partners
What exactly, then, does Nutanix Elevate entail? For starters, simplicity. As one example, the entire partner program description now runs two-and-a-half pages instead of the previous 33.
Of course, the actual changes go much deeper. Notably, Nutanix Elevate comprises a competency-based model. The company has done away with tiered participation — in its case, the pioneer, scaler and master levels will disappear. Alvarez wanted to emphasize partner capability, not size.
“It’s no longer about who sells the most or who’s the biggest,” he said.
Instead, Nutanix will place partners into one of two buckets: cloud professional or cloud champion.
“We certainly value performance and sales achievement, but we’ve put more emphasis on competency,” Alvarez said. “We feel that giving all partners of all shapes and sizes the opportunity to really show their value and their competency, and to have an equal playing field to compete with all other types of partners, [is key].”
Each designation requires certain training and Nutanix-specific certification. A cloud champion, as one might imagine, invests more time and effort and therefore will end up earning more money. Nutanix will unveil its specializations later this year.
“We would love partners to have that MBA-type of level to be specialists in … different domains,” Alvarez said. “If they have those, they can earn more because they’ve made that investment of time and money resources.”
But not all partners have to wait that long. Current master participants will get a boost on Sept. 10. That’s when every Nutanix Master partner in good standing in the current charter program will automatically become a cloud champion.
“They’ll immediately start earning all of the new wonderful incentives,” Alvarez said. “They don’t have to do anything.”
Scalers, meanwhile, have one year to choose whether to …