CHICAGO – Nutanix is set to join a growing number of cloud vendors overhauling their go-to-market partner programs in order to tap updated service offerings and take advantage of broader market uncertainty tied to how some vendors – read: Broadcom – have upended the channel partner ecosystem.

Dan Gwyn, SVP of worldwide channels at Nutanix, explained during a press briefing this week at the vendor’s .NEXT event that an update to its Elevate partner program was set to be unveiled this summer. Those updates were still being discussed, but “what we're thinking is that it's time for us to orient our incentives around platform sales and adoption,” Gwyn said.

“We're going to build a program that rewards our partners who are doing all of … land, expand, and renew, because those three are indicators that a partner is buying the platform, adopting the platform, expanding on their licenses, as well as coming back and renewing,” Gwyn said of those still percolating plans.

This focus will be on “partners who don't just sell our core product but sell our other products as well,” Gwyn added. “When they do a new logo, they come back and they do an expand deal, but they don't just sell more licenses, they maybe sell a new workload. And when they do a renewal, they don't necessarily renew the same term. Maybe they expand the term. Maybe they add and expand when they're doing the renewal. So, there's variance of what good looks like within land, expand, and renew.”

Gwyn later downplayed the extent of those changes, stating, “I'm not a big believer in making major changes to the program.”

“I'm not here implying that we're going to do massive changes, and it's going to be a one-eighty from how it used to work. The changes will be oriented toward that, but I will make them passive enough,” Gwyn said added.

Broadcom-based opportunities

Gwyn noted that Broadcom’s well-publicized changes to VMware’s channel partner program will help Nutanix’s expansion plans. These Broadcom changes have mostly been felt by changes to the VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) channel program.

“We've had a lot of former Broadcom service providers that are coming our way,” Gwyn said. “Broadcom has really just been all over the map with regards to the VCSP program and the way they've treated their partners and their service providers has been pretty rough. So, we've had a lot of service providers that we've only just met in the last year who have come to Nutanix with interest, and then we've also got those that have been committed for many years.”

Pedro Duarte, sales director at Australia-focused Nutanix channel partner Thinks Solutions, explained that his firm is one of those already committed partners and has been able to take advantage both of Nutanix’s growing services platform as well as broader market disruptions.

“Obviously, with all the disruption, it also gives us options for customers to be able to say, ‘all right, we were looking at buying hardware,’ or, ‘we can't at the moment,’ or, ‘we've got a renewal coming up with Broadcom, and we don't really have to tackle it,’” Duarte said.

Duarte noted that Thinks Solutions had been a long-standing VMware channel partner “probably for as long as we were a Nutanix partner,” but Broadcom’s VCSP changes abruptly ended that relationship.

“We were notified that they were terminating our partnership, and we were predominantly a reseller that had a significant amount of business,” Duarte said. “For us personally, the announcement came as a shock, but also we were prepared for it through our Nutanix partnership.”

Jan Gabriel, head of alliances and marketing at fellow Nutanix channel partner ITS Integra, was blunt in his assessment of Broadcom’s VCSP changes, an assessment that comes as ITS Integra continues to do channel partner work with Broadcom.

“It's a cash grab … right? That's the strategy. It's actually quite simple,” Gabriel said. “We serve mostly corporate accounts, so, arguably, those were some of the customers who are severely hit by the uplift of pricing. Basically, we're still a Broadcom partner on the … automation side, so I'm not going to talk too badly about the strategy. The strategy is absolutely clear for lots and customers.”

3 wants

Despite the dynamic nature of the current channel partner market, Gwyn did emphasize three wants Nutanix was asking for those within its ecosystem.

The first was that it wants a bigger focus on Nutanix’s “major shift” from hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to being a cloud-native platform. This shift was highlighted by the range of announcements Nutanix made tied to the .NEXT event.

“More so than ever, we are a platform, and so we really need our partners to shift to that orientation, they’re thinking platform, and where they're talking to their customers or prospects about Nutanix being the platform on which their partners deploy virtualized workloads, containerized workloads, and then the AI on top of either one of those, but it tends to be heavily Kubernetes, containerized focus,” Gwyn said.

The second want is for channel partners to wax lyrically about Nutanix’s “readiness for the current state of the market.” This is based on the vendor’s cloud-based nature and willingness to allow for license mobility at a time when supply chain constraints are forcing enterprises to evaluate their infrastructure spend.

Gwyn specifically highlighted Nutanix’s flexibility in sales and deployment timing.

“We've tried to separate software transactions very distinctly from hardware transactions that have traditionally been coupled for Nutanix,” Gwyn explained. “So rather than having all of the full transaction wait on the timing of the hardware in order for our partners to be able to monetize the transaction, and similarly for us, we said, ‘we'll do the software orders and we'll go ahead and ship so that we can keep the transaction flow moving on the software side in spite of the hardware not moving, perhaps to run it in a cloud location or something like that.’ But also, even if the customer is waiting on the hardware, we're giving free of charge periods to our customers, so that we can at least keep that side of the business moving, get the licenses out there so that whenever the hardware gets there, it's ready, but also all of us are still able to monetize the transaction and have the cash flow associated with that.”

Nutanix’s third want from channel partners is to have them be more in tune with the overall size of the vendor’s ecosystem. This includes knowledge on all of the new integration opportunities Nutanix has ladled onto its operations.

“We've invested a lot in expanding our ecosystem, not just from the standpoint of resellers and distributors, but more so, probably more importantly, from the alliance's standpoint and other ISVs with whom we're tightly partnered now, that really expands our ability to … when we say, ‘run anywhere,’ to really back that up,” Gwyn said.

These wants tie back to Nutanix’s desire to support channel partners that can work through a repeatable land, expand, and renew program.

“If I can look at a partner and say, ‘nan, that partner is good at all three,’ it's a strong indicator that we're getting exactly what we want with our customers,” Gwyn added.