Post Personnel Shake-Ups, Nutanix Elevate Emphasizes a ‘Channel-Friendly Company’
… a smart move. It beefs up the Nutanix offering “to complete in the network virtualization market, which was always a hole in their game.”
On the whole, van den Bedem said, “these announcements will validate the decision [my customers] made when they invested in the Nutanix platform.”
JustOne Solutions’ Reyes, too, is a fan of the HCI improvements. The updates “are one of the reasons we feel comfortable with Nutanix — zero downtime, totally on the fly,” he told Channel Futures. “We really see a company totally committed with the product …without all the pain related to traditional software upgrades.”
Meanwhile, both partners also praised the Karbon debut for developing and deploying apps across any cloud. Channel partners can provision more managed services, and help customers take advantage of easier operations and life cycle management, and security.
“Every hybrid cloud vendor is trying to build a cloud operating system that will run any application in any cloud,” van den Bedem said. “It’s great to see Nutanix continue developing the Karbon in that direction. My customers will appreciate the Karbon offering as a feature that they will consume in the future, rather than something they need right now.”
Reyes feels similarly about the Karbon services. These will give JustOne “an easy way” to guide customers’ container strategies, Reyes said. Overall, he looks forward to leaning on Nutanix as he works with enterprises.
“In Latin America, we are still are in the early days of hybrid cloud adoption,” he told Channel Futures. “We have huge possibilities to address business and technology requirements from our customers, and if we choose and commit with the right business partners, I’m sure we can continue growing.”
Introducing an Azure-Nutanix Pairing
Finally, Nutanix and Microsoft announced this week they have teamed up. The Nutanix Clusters service now will reside on Azure; it already lives on Amazon Web Services. The partnership enables businesses to transition to hybrid and multicloud more quickly and easily.
Nutanix Clusters pool resources for a group of physical servers. That protects data against hardware failure and allows applications to run on any node in the cluster. Nutanix HCI software powers the clusters, which deliver hybrid cloud infrastructure to run applications in private or public clouds. Instead of running on physical servers in customer data centers, they run on physical servers in Azure bare metal instances.
“We know customers are looking for solutions to truly – and simply – advance their cloud journey,” Tarkan Maner, chief commercial officer at Nutanix, said. “This partnership helps us deliver a single software stack across public and private clouds, resulting in increased agility, streamlined operations and significant cost savings.”
Turning Change Into Growth
All the partner program and product changes come after more than a year of growing pains for Nutanix — and a longer history of ups and downs with the indirect channel.
Last year, Nutanix’s global channel chief left after only 15 months on the job. The chief revenue officer also departed after the vendor reported lower-than-expected revenue guidance. That all happened nine months after Nutanix’s then-president jumped ship for a big data vendor. And just last month, Nutanix said CEO Dheeraj Pandey is retiring.
Alvarez intends to help steer a shift for Nutanix as it continues its move toward software and recurring subscription solutions.
“The channel is an integral part of our growth strategy,” Alvarez said.
He intends to use Nutanix Elevate as a lure for new partners to join forces with the company.
“This will certainly drive additional growth in the rest of our portfolio of products. We’re hoping this will drive even more mindshare across the community on a global basis. And on the flip side of that, our hope is that our partners really resonate nicely with the changes that we’ve made, that we’re able to demonstrate that we are committed to our two-tier route to market, that we are a channel-friendly company.”
Now it’s up to Nutanix – and whomever the company appoints as its new CEO – to stand behind those assertions.