Post Personnel Shake-Ups, Nutanix Elevate Emphasizes a ‘Channel-Friendly Company’
… invest in cloud professional or cloud champion, and take the requisite tests. Pioneers get a little less time — six months. Regardless, Nutanix will keep the legacy channel program going in parallel with Nutanix Elevate so partners don’t lose any benefits.
“They’re not under pressure; they don’t have to hurry up and take people out of the streets to take all the necessary requirements,” Alvarez said.
As partners begin with Elevate, they’ll probably want some help. Nutanix is meeting that need with an Americas partner support center. It will offer presales assistance, answers for technical questions and more. The center is open Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-6 p.m. ET. And as Nutanix Elevate takes off, the vendor will scale the support center into other markets.
What Else Does Nutanix Elevate Contain?
Nutanix also has instituted Performance Plus deal registration. Nothing is new in terms of a partner identifying and claiming a deal. Now, though, the process confers “a lot more protection,” eliminating the ability for another partner or the inside sales team to encroach and undercut on price. And speaking of Nutanix inside sales, under Nutanix Elevate, that team must bring a channel partner into every opportunity.
“That builds trust and collaboration,” Alvarez said. “But the magic here, and the exciting part of it is, you’re now inviting a partner based on their competency. It’s the right partner at the right time.”
Alvarez agreed that he aimed to eliminate some “territorial behavior” but, more importantly, he wanted to include more channel partners in deals for which they previously would not have been eligible.
To that end, he and his team further simplified operations by giving partners one portal. This means everything partners need to access – deal registration, marketing campaigns and so on – now reside in a single, consolidated interface.
What partners may care most about, however, lies in the financial fine print. Nutanix appears to have delivered with “enhanced profitability potential,” as Alvarez put it. That starts with incentives. Responding to partners’ requests, Nutanix Elevate now gives partners six months to expand within a new customer and earn more money.
“This is probably the No. 1, No. 2 ask that I’ve been hearing,” Alvarez said. “This is a really big deal.”
In other words, a Nutanix sale into a new client no longer means one and done. Partners now get six months to sell more Nutanix solutions to that customer and continue reaping the rewards.
“If they do all the right things they’re supposed to, the earnings potential is just huge,” he said.
A final note: Nutanix Elevate autopays every cloud professional and cloud champion partner for incentives.
“Complexity hinders the ability for partners to grow,” Alvarez said. Under Elevate, “partners, when entitled to incentives and rebates, no longer have to go through complex processes.”
Partners Have More to Sell
The momentum at Nutanix does not just apply to its partner program. This week, the company unveiled an enhanced version of its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software, and a Kubernetes-based multicloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) product. Finally, Nutanix announced a partnership with one of the big three public cloud vendors.
The HCI software now comes with 50% faster performance, easier zero-trust security and virtual networking that simplifies cloud deployments. It also features Prism Ultimate, which contains application insights and automation for troubleshooting. Nutanix Prism can even monitor non-Nutanix environments.
RoundTower’s van den Bedem is excited about the upgrades.
“Nutanix Core is the leader in the HCI market,” he said, praising Nutanix for innovating and “blazing a trail for the competition to follow.”
He specifically called out the shift of the governance/security module from Xi Beam to Flow in Prism Central as one example.
“It’s is an interesting move,” he said. “Xi Beam was something that my customers did not show much interest in; moving it to Prism Central will increase adoption, I think.”
And, he said, adding virtual private cloud on-premises was …