Nutanix’s burgeoning partner outreach plans have now encircled Pure Storage, building on recent deals that analysts note are positioning Nutanix to steal more disenchanted VMware customers.

The latest Nutanix partnership ties its Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) to Pure Storage’s FlashArray platform. This links Nutanix’s cloud infrastructure and its Flow virtual networking and security to the Pure Storage offering.

For customers, the partnership supports the deployment of Nutanix’s management layer on top of underlying servers that integrate the Pure Storage platform. Those server products are available from vendors like Cisco, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Lenovo, and Supermicro. Pure Storage and Cisco have also further extended Nutanix support to their more than 60 FlashStack validated designs.

Nutanix’s Pure Storage integration is expected to hit early access by mid-year and hit general availability by year-end.

Equity research firm William Blair noted the Pure Storage move extends Nutanix’s competitive push against larger rival VMware, which the firm said continues to experience bouts of customer dissatisfaction. These issues come from Broadcom’s alterations to VMware’s pricing and licensing structure.

“Running standalone AHV on existing three-tier infrastructure provides dissatisfied VMware customers with an easier migration route off VMware as it removes the need for hardware refreshes,” William Blair noted in its report.

The Pure Storage deal follows quickly on Nutanix launching commercial availability of a similar product with Dell Technologies. The offering, which was initially hinted at last August and commercially unveiled last month, ties external storage support and integration between Nutanix’s Cloud Platform with its AHV hypervisor and Dell’s PowerFlex storage platform. The combo was the first external storage integrated with Nutanix’s platform and is being targeted at enterprises that want to independently manage and scale compute and storage resources in their hybrid cloud environments.

Nutanix is partnering to power

These deals continue moves by Nutanix to bolster its position in the market. The vendor has put several programs in place with other vendors to help migrate disgruntled VMware customers, including work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cisco.

Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami during a press interview session after it released its most recent earnings said the vendor added “roughly about 700 customers in this quarter,” and that “the vast majority of them are probably VMware customers.” The executive added that these are customers are “largely moving away from those legacy VMware stacks.”

That result built on the 630 new customers Nutanix added during the previous quarter.

Ramaswami during the most recent earnings call said that the vendor was seeing “early traction” with customers migrating from VMware Cloud on AWS to the AWS-powered Nutanix offering, and from running in an on-premises environment to the public cloud. These migrations are happening “within a matter of months because one of the things that we don’t have to worry about in a cloud-to-cloud migration is the hardware refresh is not an issue anymore,” Ramaswami explained.

Nutanix’s work with Cisco was also a “good contributor for us in new logos, especially this quarter, as well as over the last couple of quarters,” Ramaswami said, adding that, “we expect to see that partnership continue to grow and are working very closely with them as we go to market.”

Nutanix did see a “small contribution” during the most recent quarter from some of its reseller work with Dell, with expectations that the more integrated work will start showing up in its next calendar quarter.

Ramaswami added that many of those potential customers remain on multi-year contracts with VMware, which will delay opportunities for Nutanix. That opportunity could also be delayed as “hardware refreshes are needed in many cases to convert them over.”

William Blair in its recent report predicts Nutanix will continue to strike integration deals to further target VMware customers and value-added resellers (VARs).

“We believe these partnerships illustrate the gradual ecosystem shift toward Nutanix as customers and VARs become increasingly disillusioned with Broadcom’s impact on the VMware organization,” the firm wrote.