Highlighting its ongoing leadership position in cloud computing and Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) technologies, Nutanix recently announced it was named a Customers’ Choice in the 2022 Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer for HCI software for the fourth consecutive year. When HCI is coupled with intelligent software, we see the evolution of solutions like our NCI platform, which creates flexible building blocks that replace legacy infrastructure previously consisting of separate servers, storage networks, and storage arrays.

“Our NCI solution is known for simplifying IT environments with a server-based software-defined model. The New Cloud Bundles extend this to make it easier for our channel network across EMEA to order hybrid cloud infrastructure, multi-cloud management, unified storage, database, and desktop services solutions. Nutanix is a partner-driven organization, and we want to equip our extensive channel base with innovative solutions on which they can deliver their own value-added services to ensure their end-user customers are ready to scale in an increasingly cloud-based world,” says Adam Tarbox, Vice President of EMEA Channel Sales at Nutanix.

Organizations are increasingly reliant on technology ecosystems that enable innovation at scale. The New Nutanix Cloud Bundles integrate a diverse stack of Nutanix solutions to equip channel partners with the means to deliver demonstrable business returns in the cloud for their customers.

Adam Tarbox, Vice President of EMEA Channel Sales at Nutanix.

“Business and technology leaders must undergo an intensive process to identify which cloud environment is right for their organization. Nutanix channel partners have the skills and experience across industry verticals to ensure business deliverables are aligned with cloud-driven innovation. Our New Cloud Bundles simplifies this process and delivers an integrated environment while still offering the flexibility and scalability of NCI,” adds Tarbox.

The New Cloud Bundles for the commercial market are available in three versions:

• The Starter Bundle provides commercial customers with the core components of a hyper-converged environment with NCI Starter, which converges the entire data center stack, including computing, storage, networking, and virtualization.
• The Pro Bundle sees NCI Pro and Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Starter on cores. NCM provides coverage for Nutanix and VMware private clouds. NCM can also be tailored to create an ‘invisible cloud’ by having developers access hybrid multi-cloud resources through a marketplace-like platform, controlling what is visible to them, or having governance policies around resource consumption.
• The Ultimate Bundle comprises NCI Ultimate and NCM Starter. It delivers hyper-converged performance at scale across a varied application environment. The solutions deliver the highest performance and SAN features that organizations use daily.

The three bundles are available with production-level support. Any of the offerings can be quoted for a core capacity of between 72 and 192 cores. This means that unlike previously, the new bundles do not have a fixed configuration but are only limited based on the minimum and a maximum number of cores. A promotional NUS Pro bundle can also be added to any of the three versions. This bundle can be quoted for a capacity of between 5 to 10 TiBs.

Any existing Nutanix Cloud Bundles offers are valid until the end of December 2022, when the transition to New Cloud Bundles will be complete. For legacy bundle customers, Nutanix is working on the process of selling them the New Cloud Bundles at the time of renewal.

Nutanix partners benefit from the same level of marketing support that they would otherwise receive when addressing the enterprise market. New partners interested in the Nutanix commercial packages must first register for the Nutanix Partner Program.

“Organizations are embracing hybrid multi-cloud to easily scale from on-prem to the public cloud, optimize costs for performant and secure workloads, and tap into a flexible subscription model,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, President, and CEO of Nutanix.

“While public cloud has solidified as a crucial investment for businesses, many customers need to run and manage workloads across public and private cloud environments,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud + AI Group, Microsoft.

“Nutanix and Azure solution addresses key challenges many enterprises are facing by providing unified management across clouds with applications, data, and license portability,” said Paul Nashawaty, Senior Analyst at The Enterprise Strategy Group.

Customers can leverage NC2 on Azure to:

• Simplify and optimize disaster recovery, eliminating the need to maintain a secondary site by utilizing Microsoft Azure’s on-demand capacity for failover.
• Access on-demand capacity bursting to Microsoft Azure, rapidly scaling capacity while leveraging existing applications and tooling.
• Migrate and modernize their data centers by easily moving their existing applications and data without costly and time-consuming refactoring or retooling.

“Microsoft Azure and Nutanix have been popular technology choices of TCS customers looking for digital transformation, and NC2 on Azure is an attractive option for us to help our customers extend and migrate their on-prem workloads into a cloud space more easily. The ability to rapidly deploy and burst workloads through NC2 on Azure is vital to our customer’s hybrid and multi-cloud strategy,” said Dinanath Kholkar, SVP and Global Head of Partner Ecosystems & Alliances at TCS.

What products and solutions will you be showcasing at GITEX Global 2022?

Nutanix will be sharing our company’s vision and strategy that emphasizes that enterprises should never settle for Cloud chaos, but rather, embrace a hybrid multicloud platform that prioritizes simplicity, flexibility, and freedom of choice.

Over the past year, Nutanix has re-packaged its solutions to make them even more simple, to offer a consistent operating model across all types of clouds: public, private, and hybrid. We are keen to demonstrate these innovations at GITEX:

• Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI): Providing complete software solutions including virtual compute, storage, and networking for virtual machines and containers, that can be deployed in private data centers on the hardware of the organization’s choice or in public clouds
• Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM): If an organization is managing multiple cloud deployments, Nutanix can support by driving consistent governance across private and public clouds, helping custom
  

  Mohammed Abulhouf, Senior Sales Director, Middle East – Nutanix

  ers accelerate their cloud journey

• Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS): Nutanix supports a variety of workloads deployed anywhere – private, public, or hybrid by allowing software-defined storage for multiple protocols ((volumes, files, objects). This is a single point of management for all storage resources
• Nutanix End User Computing Solutions: This speaks to running applications and workloads anywhere, on any device supporting the new normal of remote work and remote learning
• Nutanix Database Service (NDB):Simplifies database management across hybrid multicloud environments for database engines such, as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle Database

We’ve done just that with Nutanix Era, a Database-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution ‘On Your Terms’. In the same way, the Nutanix Cloud Platform has made IT infrastructure ‘invisible’, Nutanix Era is a database lifecycle management software that runs on the Nutanix Cloud Platform and empowers organizations to achieve invisible databases. Era can manage databases deployed on on-premises infrastructure and a public cloud of choice, making it a true multicloud solution ready to modernize databases.

What do you hope to achieve from your participation at the event this year?

As always, GITEX offers a brilliant platform to promote our brand. Most importantly, it’s a way to reconnect with our customers and partners at scale. We anticipate even more traffic coming in from the other GCC countries, such as Saudi Arabia – which is a hyper-growth market for us.

What will be your theme of participation at GITEX?

Nutanix will be exhibiting with the theme “Cloud on Your Terms” intending to help regional organizations master the art of Cloud freedom

Do you plan to run any activities alongside GITEX?

We are running a series of executive dinners during GITEX week and have several MoU signings that will occur at our stand.

Where can trade visitors find you at GITEX?

Nutanix will showcase its beautiful stand H6-A30 in Hall 6 at GITEX, which has been designed to be inviting, safe, and open space for great conversations. This year key alliance partners and resellers have been welcomed to participate along with the company. The focus is on emerging alliances including HYCU, ArcServ & Stratodesk.

After the infrastructure migration, BUPA asserts the following outcomes:

• The whole system becomes a lot simpler and easier to manage with on-demand scaling
• Support has been streamlined with just one point of contact for all issues
• All can now be managed from the same console, eliminating the need for expert skills thereby freeing up staff to concentrate on other tasks
• Nutanix Calm automates all aspects of the application lifecycle

Q&A with Christian Alvarez

What should channel partners do to remain relevant and successful in a Hybrid Multicloud World?

We see customers’ reliance on and expectations for enterprise cloud capabilities intensifying. Many are building the future of their businesses on hybrid multi-cloud IT operations, which blend private and public cloud services. This paradigm shift in customer expectations and cloud acceleration is leading prudent service providers into new partnerships.

Christian Alvarez, Senior VP – Worldwide Channels

You can’t do it alone. Scaling a business and sustaining profitability requires working on creating partnerships that give customers a simpler way to drive their digital transformation. That involves consulting, design, new products, integration, customization, and 24×7 support. Partnerships can provide the expertise needed to promote, sell, design, integrate, customize, deploy and support new applications on-premises, in the public cloud, or hybrid cloud architectures.

That’s what’s behind the Nutanix Elevate Service Provider Program. It helps providers pursue partnerships that can improve customer experiences, competitiveness, and profitability. There’s no minimum commitment or cost to service providers to join the program, which allows carriers of all sizes to participate.

How have you updated your channel program to align with modern-day trends?

“Channel Autonomy” is one of our key objectives when it comes to our channel program. We wish to empower our channel ecosystem so that they can independently drive our business with minimal involvement from our sales team. We want to train them and make them true champions of Nutanix and in this way the partner and distribution community will be a true extension of our company. 

Q&A with Adam Tarbox

What are some of your immediate priorities in your role?

The key priority at the moment is on building on the existing deep relationships we have with partners.

We are also focusing our efforts on being even easier to do business with by investing in the simplification and automation of our processes to allow partners to transact faster. Another area of focus is enabling each partner’s differentiation with a platform that enables partners to build not only traditional deployment services but also stand-up new practice areas. When it comes to DevOps or AI, this can provide sources of competitive differentiation as well as faster time to market of new offerings.

Christian Alvarez, Senior VP – Worldwide Channels

What is Nutanix’s mission or goal in EMEA?

Our mission in EMEA is the same as our overall corporate mission which is to ‘Delight customers with a simple, open, hybrid, and multi-cloud software platform with rich data services to build, run, and manage any application’. Our vision is to “Make clouds invisible, freeing customers to focus on their business outcomes.”

What are some of the main challenges facing you and the business today?

The past year has brought many changes to the channel partner ecosystem and subscription and consumption are on everyone’s mind. This is creating uncertainty for the channel ecosystem as it looks for new ways to sustain profitability. Many vendors have announced that they are moving towards subscription but haven’t provided insight to partners on what this means aside from some new incentives. As many vendors have taken renewals ‘direct’ – we have not and will not, we have always and will continue to be committed to the channel and our distribution partners.

Speaking about the partnership, Mr. Saeed Nader, Channel Sales Manager – Saudi Arabia & Bahrain at Nutanix said, “Digital transformation has been a top priority for organizations in Saudi for the past two years. The COVID-19 pandemic has further created a pressing need for enterprises to speed up their plans to enable the work from home/ remote working trend. In this scenario, cloud computing is seen as one of the pillars of a digital transformation strategy.”

Nutanix will assist SBM in developing and certifying its staff to provide design, configuration, and support capabilities. Nutanix will conduct regular training and enablement sessions for online certifications, product updates, and workshops for hands-on instruction. SBM technical and sales staff will have access to the various tools and resources available as part of Nutanix Elevate (program). Nutanix will also make available skilled resources to assist the partner in the execution of its Nutanix opportunities.

“We are constantly looking to form alliances with best-of-breed technology vendors that share our vision. We believe that with the power of Nutanix’s solutions, we are now well-positioned to serve the digital transformation technology needs of enterprises in Saudi,” said Mr. Hassona Al Quraan, VP – Infrastructure & Network Technology at SBM.

Key elements of the partnership include:

• Red Hat OpenShift as the preferred choice for enterprise full stack Kubernetes on Nutanix Cloud Platform. Customers looking to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) will be able to use an industry-leading cloud platform from Nutanix, which includes both Nutanix AOS and AHV.
• Nutanix Cloud Platform is now a preferred choice for HCI for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift. This will enable customers to deploy virtualized and containerized workloads on a hyperconverged infrastructure, building on the combined benefits of Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies and Nutanix’s hyperconverged offerings.
• Nutanix AHV is now a Red Hat certified hypervisor enabling full support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift on Nutanix Cloud Platform. The certification of the Nutanix built-in hypervisor, AHV, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift offers enterprise customers a simplified full stack solution for their containerized and virtualized cloud-native applications. This certification delivers Red Hat customers additional choice in hypervisor deployments, especially as many organizations explore innovative, modern virtualization technologies.
• Joint engineering roadmap providing robust interoperability. Red Hat and Nutanix will focus on delivering continuous testing of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift with Nutanix AHV to provide robust interoperability. The companies will also collaborate to deliver more timely support by aligning product roadmaps.
• More seamless support experience providing faster resolution times for joint customers. Customers will be able to contact either company with support issues. The two companies are collaborating to deliver a best-in-class support experience for the interoperability of the certified products.

Because of its distributed architecture, Nutanix Cloud Platform delivers an IT environment that is highly scalable and resilient, and well-suited for enterprise deployments of Red Hat OpenShift at scale. The platform also includes fully integrated unified storage, addressing many tough challenges operators routinely face in configuring and managing storage for stateful containers.

 Supporting Quotes

Rajiv Ramaswami, president and CEO, Nutanix

“This partnership brings together Red Hat’s industry-leading cloud native solutions with the simplicity, flexibility and resilience of the Nutanix Cloud Platform. Together, our solutions provide customers with a full stack platform to build, scale, and manage containerized and virtualized cloud native applications in a hybrid multicloud environment.”

 Paul Cormier, president and CEO, Red Hat

“We have a vision to enable open hybrid clouds, where customers have choice and flexibility. Our partnership with Nutanix brings a leading hyperconverged offering to the open hybrid cloud, driving greater choice for our joint customers in how they deploy their containerized workloads and backed by a joint support experience.”

Eric Sheppard, research vice president, IDC

“Organizations around the world are deploying an increasingly diverse mix of modern and cloud-native workloads. This Red Hat and Nutanix partnership, and in particular the collaborative support agreement between the two companies, helps to bring virtualized applications and Red Hat OpenShift-based containerized workloads running on Nutanix’s Cloud Platform together in a way that will benefit exactly these types of organizations and help to drive increased simplicity, agility, scalability within today’s complex hybrid-cloud world.”

Ritch Houdek, senior vice president, Technology, Kohl’s

“We are thrilled to see two of our technology partners announce this strategic relationship. As we manage the complexities of hybrid cloud, we believe this relationship will unlock new hosting and deployment options for VM and container-based workloads. These new options will support our goals of being fast, efficient and friction-free as we deliver new experiences to our customers.”

 Gautam Roy, chief technology officer, Unum

“The insurance industry is in the midst of a transformation to rapidly adapt to customers’ demands,” said. “We protect 39 million lives around the world with our products and services. As we work to modernize our IT infrastructure to support a seamless digital experience for our customers and employees, Nutanix and Red Hat help simplify our technology stack and advance our cloud transformation.”