For Nutanix, it's all about giving customers flexibility

For Nutanix, it’s beyond just enabling customers to migrate from VMware. It’s about being on a multi-year journey with customers as they continue to build and develop applications.

At .Next in Washington D.C, Nutanix made the point to emphasize that they are all about giving both partners and customers simplicity and flexibility when it comes to using their solutions.

Among the announcements at .Next include the availability of Nutanix on Google Cloud. After partnerships with AWS in 2022 and Azure in 2022, the partnership with Google Cloud indicates the increasing options customers have to move applications from their current infrastructure into the Nutanix platform, especially for a multi-cloud environment.

Nutanix also announced the integration of its cloud platform with Pure Storage’s Flash Array. With this collaboration, the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure solution, powered by the Nutanix AHV hypervisor along with Nutanix Flow virtual networking and security, will integrate with Pure Storage FlashArray over NVMe/TCP to deliver a customer experience uniquely designed for high-demand data workloads, including AI.

The collaboration with Nutanix will also see another coming together as Cisco looks to be part of the platform as well. FlashStack with Nutanix will be a fully validated solution to market that combines Cisco’s UCS servers, unified computer servers, Cisco switches, the Nutanix cloud platform on Cisco UCS combined together with Pure Flash arrays.

On bringing the Nutanix platform together with external storage, there will now be general availability of the Nutanix cloud platform with Dell PowerFlex. Dell PowerFlex with Nutanix Cloud Platform brings together the scalability and performance of Dell PowerFlex with a proven hypervisor, integrated disaster recovery and network security from Nutanix. Through the deep integration with Nutanix Cloud Platform, PowerFlex now offers expanded support for Nutanix AHV, providing enterprises with a flexible hypervisor option to meet diverse needs.

Given the need for a common data platform that can run across bare-metal, virtualized, and containerized infrastructure, Nutanix also announced a Cloud Native AOS solution, which extends Nutanix enterprise storage and advanced data services to hyperscaler Kubernetes services and cloud-native bare-metal environments - without requiring a hypervisor. Cloud Native AOS enables storage and data services to run directly on cloud-native infrastructure anywhere, in the cloud or on bare metal, allowing users to consolidate storage management across the distributed hybrid cloud.

On AI, Nutanix builds on its partnership with NVIDIA through the latest version of the Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI) solution. NAI adds deeper integration with NVIDIA AI Enterprise, including NVIDIA NIM microservices and the NVIDIA NeMo framework, to speed the deployment of Agentic AI applications in the enterprise.

Giving customers what they want

For Nutanix, it’s beyond just enabling customers to migrate from VMware. It’s about being on a multi-year journey with customers as they continue to build and develop applications. It’s about being that platform company that can offer a lot more use cases to customers. And it's about building the partner ecosystem and community for the long run.

This was shared by Rajiv Ramaswami, President and CEO at Nutanix in a media interview at .NEXT. As Nutanix made several huge announcements at the summit, the key talking points remained focused on how customers are moving away from VMware towards Nutanix simply because of the simplicity and minimal complexities in the process.

“It’s a multi-year journey. While we are seeing more customers migrate to Nutanix, it's still a slow process. There are still customers that are renewing contracts with VMware because they need time to plan their migration. And we see this continuing for the next several years. We don’t see a tip over. It will be a gradual continued situation,” said Ramaswami.

Overall, Ramaswami believes that Nutanix’s growth since last year, be it from customers and partners, is a testament to their capabilities in providing the flexibility and options needed today.

Nutanix in Asia

When asked about the situation with enterprises in the Asia Pacific region, Ramaswami mentioned that it varies based on countries in the region. For example, India is seeing one of the fastest migrations from VMware into Nutanix. However, in Japan, it’s at a much slower pace.

“If you look at within Asia, we've done really well in India. I would say Japan has been somewhat slower. They have been much more conservative and slower to move. That's probably going to be maybe a year or two behind others. Conservative countries tend to be a little slower. Some countries tend to have faster adoption. It varies across the region quite a bit,” said Ramaswami.

Ramaswami added that Nutanix won Toshiba in Japan based on merit and ease of migration. As Japan is a conservative country, Ramaswami believes for Toshiba to do that evaluation and speak about it publicly indicates that Japanese companies have lost trust on VMware.

The channel ecosystem

As a channel first company, Ramaswami explained that customers are now looking at Nutanix as more of a platform company and not just a best of breed HCI company. As a full platform company, Nutanix can handle a much broader set of use cases with customers and Ramaswami said this is drawing not just the channel partners but the broader ecosystem of partners as well.

“We transact through our channel partners. We don't go direct on a broad basis like some of the other players do. And after VMware got acquired by Broadcom, the channel programs changed quite a bit. They were more focused on going direct in their top accounts. They had a lot of transitions with respect to their channel program, and they have new channel programs. So that created a lot of interest in the channel community,” said Ramaswami.

In terms of ensuring partners and customers have the right skills when using Nutanix, Ramaswami acknowledged that because VMware has been around for some time, many are trained on VMware. However, he pointed out Nutanix is focused on building up its services capabilities.

“We're working to build up our channel partners in terms of them being able to offer services. So, one of the big focuses at .Next is on the training and certifications and education. There's a bit of a learning curve, but it's not much of a learning curve as well. It's actually simpler to use Nutanix compared to using other platforms. So, for people, I think it's more of a mindset and inertia,” said Ramaswami.

The journey with Nutanix

For Ramaswami, enterprises have the choice in deciding who they want to work with. However, he believes that enterprises should note that they are running mission critical workloads at the end of the day.

As such, when picking a vendor, they need to realize that whoever they pick will be a very core partner to them for many years. Enterprises should go with a vendor they know will take care of them and support them in the long run. They should also go for a vendor that is going to continue to innovate and bring new capabilities to the market going forward.

“What most customers think about is what their future end state be? Who's going to deliver them a modern infrastructure that can support not only the needs of today but also the needs of tomorrow? And who's going to take care of them and support them?” concluded Ramaswami.