Nutanix rolled out a streamlined product portfolio of its Cloud Platform capabilities in terms of packaging, pricing, and metering. The move follows the vendor’s “mantra of simplification” that CEO Rajiv Ramaswami has been pushing.

“​​We're known for having a simple user experience, a unified interface for all of these products in the portfolio,” said Thomas Cornely, SVP of product management at Nutanix. “But what we want to do here is streamline and bring the same simplicity we're known for on the product side to how we go to market and how we deliver these things to our customers through our channel and audience.”

The simplified portfolio boils down to five core areas: cloud infrastructure, cloud management, complementary storage, database, and desktop services. It brings together the company’s product capabilities across on-premise and multi-cloud environments, including Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Clusters, Cloud Manager, Unified Storage, Database Service, and End User Computing Solutions. 

Currently, Nutanix Cloud Clusters supports Amazon Web Services (AWS), and it's in preview on Microsoft Azure. The Cloud Manager service supports both AWS and Azure.

On top of streamlining, the simplified portfolio also offers more flexibility in storage usage, according to Cornely. Now, the storage service is capacity-based and gives users options to choose where to put files and objects. 

While Cornley admits the simplified portfolio mainly benefits new customers, Nutanix will help existing customers convert to this new portfolio via licensing choices — but this might “be a fairly lengthy transition process,” he said. “We're not going to push customers on this. We work with them and make this more of an opt-in as time goes on. We want customers to see the value of the portfolio and effectively want to go and convert.”

Driving simplicity has been a top priority for Ramaswami since he stepped into the chief executive role at Nutanix. “Some [customers] would like us to make it easier for them to adopt and consume our software by delivering more solutions that bring our portfolio together and to simplify the pricing and package,” he told SDxCentral in an earlier interview. 

This strategy led Nutanix to bundled some products together under the new portfolio instead of selling each separately.

Cornely used Nutanix’s network virtualization service Flow as an example. The vendor used to sell it as a separate product and as an add-on to its core service. But under the new portfolio, it becomes a built-in feature of the cloud infrastructure service. This aligns “metering on the course, on premises, and virtual instance for workloads in public clouds, to make it easier for customers to consume the right solutions, ” he added.