Partners acknowledge simplicity Nutanix provides customers in migration

“There's so many different options now that the enterprises can explore, and they're obviously looking for ease, simplicity, efficiency, cost reductions, and whatever makes sense for their current requirement,” says Michael Magura, Vice President, Partner Sales in APJ at Nutanix.

Nutanix continues to witness an increase in customers, especially after the changes imposed by VMware since the Broadcom acquisition closed. In fact, many VMware customers found themselves reassessing their strategies as products, licenses, and partner programs are thrown into a world of uncertainty.

This year, organizations are now facing the challenge of re-evaluating their cloud and AI strategies to navigate this ever-shifting landscape, making sure that they're able to mitigate risks in case of future industry disruptions.

“Broadcom acquiring VMware caused a lot of customers to consider what kind of a strategy they need to implement going forward. Some of which is dual vendor strategy, but certainly risk mitigation and security is at the top of their list and the forefront of their thinking,” said Michael Magura, Vice President, Partner Sales in APJ at Nutanix in a recent media roundtable discussion with partners from the region.

According to Magura, there's so many different options now that the enterprises can explore, and they're obviously looking for ease, simplicity, efficiency, cost reductions, and whatever makes sense for their current requirement. But their priorities are certainly shifting, and partners are playing an important role in helping them.

Partners enabling customers to migrate to Nutanix

Magura highlighted that migration was the number one ask in all aspects in every market from customers to the extent that it was hard for partners to keep up with the demand of providing a migration path and strategy.

Despite this, partners in the Asia Pacific region were able to answer this call, as stated by Pedro Duarte, Sales Director for Think Solutions in Australia. Duarte mentioned that Nutanix has enabled freedom of choice, which has helped customers in a couple of different ways.

First, there is the freedom of choice of hypervisor. Duarte said Think Solutions has got several Nutanix customers who started their Nutanix journey on VMware. With the current uncertainties, there are native tools in Nutanix that allow them to migrate from VMware to Nutanix AHV.

Another way is leveraging Nutanix Move, especially with the ethos of freedom of choice, which makes it really easy for customers to migrate from clouds, VMware, and even off Nutanix to other platforms.

“I've got a scenario at the moment where we've just migrated a customer that had 400 terabytes of data. Ttypically when you're looking at that scale of migration from a different hypervisor, that's a major undertaking, but the reality is with Nutanix Move, that was done in a week. So, if a customer wants to shift quickly, we can shift quickly because the tooling supports that instead of making it extremely complex. And that's really the simplicity that Nutanix has when it develops all their products and something that we've always valued in the partnership,” explained Duarte.

For Toshihiro Kan, General Manager, Telecoms Engineering Development Department at CTC Itochu in Japan, Nutanix is becoming the number one destination in migration plans for customers.

“And why are customers choosing to go with Nutanix? Well, because in Japan, they have a lot of virtualized platforms and on top of that, they acknowledge that their systems are complex and Nutanix provides the answers to all of these difficult requirements,” said Kan.

Kan also echoed Duarte’s comments that Nutanix Move tool is an outstanding tool that provides very little downtime of the virtual machines when moving to a new platform. Kan pointed out that in Japan too, customers are combining the AHV and the Move tool and there's great interest in the combination of the two.

“I've worked together with our customers on POCs and verifying that their virtualized platform on the new Nutanix platform is working,” added Kan.

Taking the extra mile

Apart from customers in Australia and Japan, Magura also highlighted the Indian market which he believes is very unique in the world right now, especially with the growth and the transformation the country has been experiencing

With that said, Indian partners are also helping customers find an alternate way to look for solutions that can mitigate their risk. For partners in India, customers are finding Nutanix the fair alternative.

Ashutosh Deuskar, owner of VDA Infosolutions in India stated that in his conversations with Nutanix leaders, they have realized that all customers may not be migrate to this journey because of the application and the infra complexity to Nutanix because of their current investments on VMware Broadcom.

“Nutanix is taking an extra mile and extra steps that we have witnessed in the market. We leverage that with customers that Nutanix is giving a clear path to customers to eventually move from the traditional way of working to Nutanix while not having impact on their current investment. This includes giving certain free services or subscription, to not all, but a very large, massive set of enterprise customers. And we have seen that the customers are leveraging those benefits from Nutanix,” said Deuskar.

At the same time, Deuskar mentioned that during this period of uncertainty, Nutanix has provided a consistent, simplified infrastructure. Deuskar highlighted how they migrated a couple of very large customers on Nutanix from the traditional earlier subscriptions to the new Nutanix subscriptions. He added that VDA Infosolutions supports both on-prem and cloud environments and is getting very good feedback from customers.

“I hope more customers will take this advantage to migrate to the Nutanix platform. And obviously we as a partner are getting more revenue, not only in terms of acquisition the customers, but also in terms of the services,” said Deuskar.

Meanwhile, Roshan Shetty, co-founder and owner of Citius Cloud in India pointed out that VMware was a key part of any enterprise, medium and small data center and it ran most of the mission critical tier one, tier two, tier three applications.

“If you have to change something like that in your infrastructure, it's a big change. It's a big decision that the customer has to take. And I think since I'm an early adopter of Nutanix since 2016, I think there's something that resonates. What Nutanix has really done for customers is really simplified their transition from the existing hypervisor to the Nutanix platform. And I think that has really helped partners like us as well as customers. And that is why in India as a region, you've seen this massive adoption of Nutanix and transitioning over,” said Shetty.