Exclusive Interview: Ritesh Syal, Director and Channel Head, Nutanix

In an exclusive interview with DQ Channels, Ritesh Syal, Head and Director, Channels and Alliances, India, Nutanix discussed how their partner programme has progressed over the year, the company’s future roadmap for their channel ecosystem, and what it means for partners as more businesses look for subscription models.

How have you supported your channel ecosystem over the past year? How has the India Partner Support Centre contributed so far to your channel ecosystem?

It has been a year since the launch of our revamped global partner programme, Elevate. This has been an extremely important programme for our channel ecosystem - partners have been able to maintain focus on customers since engagement through the programme has been made so simple. The program cuts away complexity and increases incentive potential for our partners.

We also added the Nutanix Elevate Service Provider Program (NESPP) a few months ago to focus on our service provider partners; helping them increase profitability and agility by removing lock-in and minimum commitment limitations that come with standard contracts and partner programs.

When we look at India specifically, our Partner Support Center (PSC) team in Bangalore has really worked closely with our ecosystem in the APJ region. The India PSC has been enabling our partners to accelerate the adoption of the Everything-as-a-Service (EaaS) model while utilizing the whole Nutanix product line. In the face of shifting consumer requirements, EaaS is gaining traction; the model offers financial benefits by allowing businesses to accomplish specific IT goals faster and to devote more time and resources to high-value business activities. With the introduction of the PSC, we have seen a marked uptake in the number of transacting partners quarter on quarter; contributing to revenue and an upskilling of our partner ecosystem.

Could you tell us more about the new distributor program and how it will help partners drive scale, greater operational efficiencies, and sizing for multi-vendor solutions?

Our goal for our partner program has been to build paths for profit and growth for our partners of any size or solution area and our Elevate Distributor program does just that.

Over the past year, distributors have reinforced their value to the entire IT channel because of how they have been able to connect with the partner community. They have been focused on digitalization of the selling process for customers, by acquiring and implementing new technology to enable purchasing with less friction. They are even using the power of analytics, and market intelligence via AI/ML, to essentially drive more fluid business.

Our Elevate Distributor program makes it easier for partners to identify such distributors who are equipped with the capabilities and skillsets required to drive their unique growth. The program will enable partners to find the right distributor to complement their needs - across sales, technical or digital distribution capability. Essentially, the program helps Distributor operational efficiency, sales velocity and profitability.

You have announced multiple partnerships with companies like Red Hat, Lenovo, HPE, AWS, and most recently with Citrix. Can you expand on the significance of these partnerships and how it helps your customers in India?

Our partnerships focus on two main things - choice and flexibility. In today’s hybrid multi-cloud world, India’s enterprises are realizing that it takes a host of solution providers to deliver a complete solution for the unique needs of their business. The need for customization and bespoke requirements will continue and even increase as enterprises provide a differentiated experience to their own customers. Nutanix delivers a compelling value proposition through such best of breed partnerships and alliances and offers enterprises the freedom of choice with hybrid multi-cloud.

For example, customers using enterprise hardware from OEMs like HPE, Lenovo, Fujitsu, Inspur, Dell EMC, and IBM can very easily use Nutanix hybrid cloud infrastructure on top of their existing hardware, since we are platform and hypervisor agnostic. The availability of Nutanix Clusters on AWS and Azure delivers the industry’s first cloud platform with the flexibility, simplicity, and cost efficiency needed to manage applications and infrastructure in private and public clouds operated as a single cloud.

The partnership we announced this week with Citrix is another great example of our philosophy on this- together we are providing secure, on-demand, and elastic access to apps, desktops, and data from any device, in any location, at any scale through Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and hybrid multi-cloud deployments of Citrix services. Our Red Hat partnership is proving to be great for customers and partners - our channel partners can cross-sell in their accounts and deliver a complete full-stack to a customer looking to build out and run modern apps in addition to traditional applications.

How is your channel strategy mapped out for the next year? Can you expand on what technologies your partners should focus on?

Technology has become a strategic priority for India’s businesses since the pandemic, and a majority of enterprises have increased their investments into hybrid multi-cloud in order to gain a competitive advantage, according to our latest Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index report for India. Our customers have expressed a need for agility, flexibility and resilience from their IT architecture, and this includes flexibility in how technology is consumed. We strongly believe that subscription-based consumption is the present and future of enterprise technology, and have been empowering our partner ecosystem to align with this trend.

For partners, the next wave of opportunity and innovation will be in how applications get developed and deployed- customers and partners both are gravitating toward platforms that can rethink how to accomplish infrastructure as code. The delivery of services like AI digitalization and using low-code and no-code DevOps approaches is gaining importance, so partners are turning to vendors to assist them in these areas.

Finally, automation will also remain a key priority as businesses look at spending less time on operational IT and more time on adopting digital approaches to the sales process. Investing in our back-office automation and platform integration has helped our partners save up to 60 percent on transaction time.

For the next year, partners will look at expanding their skill sets to focus on these new technologies, and Nutanix will ensure that they have the resources and support to drive innovation for customers.