For Nutanix, it is all about providing simplicity for partners

“We don't look at only revenue when it comes to progressing a partner through a tier. We look at it both from a revenue perspective as well as their skills in terms of certifications and enablement as well,” explains Harsh Vaishnav, Senior Director and Head of Channels for ASEAN, Hong Kong, India, and SAARC at Nutanix.

As a 100% channel focused and driven vendor, Nutanix continues to ensure its partners are able to get the most out of them when working with customers. This means ensuring partners not only have simplicity in working with the vendor but also having a seamless process overall.

In an interview with CRN Asia, Harsh Vaishnav, Senior Director and Head of Channels for ASEAN, Hong Kong, India, and SAARC at Nutanix shares how Nutanix continues to ensure its partners that understand what they want and capable of supporting them in addressing customer needs.

The following is the conversation Vaishnav had with CRN Asia.

What are partners looking for the most from Nutanix?

Partners are looking at how vendors like us can get them products and platforms that are simple and clear, and in essence, help them engage better, transact better, and most importantly, build businesses and practices that are extremely profitable.

We're seeing that the customer environments are changing at breakneck speed. And partners are looking at how do we help them drive genuine outcomes? How do we make them absolutely close to as well as relevant to what the customer wants to do in a way that drives customer delight?

This includes helping them build skills around not just our hybrid cloud or hyperconverged infrastructure or hybrid cloud infrastructure story but also make them relevant around things that we are seeing coming increasingly our way, which is around cloud native applications, Kubernetes and AI.

All of this needs to be wrapped around with a few things which I believe are non-negotiable from the partner's perspective. They continue to be invested with vendors like Nutanix who have gone ahead and promised them that we are in this for the long haul, which means we are committed to be in this business together, making a long-term commitment.

Whatever we do, we do it responsibly with trust, with no loose lips. And we are very transparent in terms of how we roll out our programs, how well we execute these programs, and make sure that we make this a profitable business for our partners. I think that's what continues to come back from our partners when we converse with them.

Does that include simplicity in partner onboarding and enablement?

We're very simple when it comes to the onboarding process as far as the partners are concerned. From a partnership progress perspective, the way we've sort of laid out our partnership tiers, we've made it very easy for our partners to not just comprehend what's the partner status is but also progress smoothly through the tiers.

To give you a perspective, we don't look at only revenue when it comes to progressing a partner through a tier. We look at it both from a revenue perspective as well as their skills in terms of certifications and enablement as well.

And based on that, we progress a partner from one tier to the other. We also give a lot more emphasis on acquiring new customers. So, a partner could actually look at a combination of either revenue plus the certification or the number of new logos plus the certification and can actually move through tiers.

Last year, we added another tier to sort of differentiate and give partners who do a lot of heavy lifting across technologies and help us get into bigger deals to be differentiated and move to something called a Premier Tier. Currently in ASEAN, we have three partners who have moved to the highest tier of partnership called the Premier Status. And that's again, something that is very exclusive.

As far as the newer partners are concerned, who want to join Nutanix, I think our registration process is actually very simple. They can actually go to the Partner Help platform, or they can go to a distributor. The distributor can connect them to a partner help portal or a partner help alias. We share the documents with them and sign it.

Once the documents are proper and in shape, we take anywhere between 24 to 48 hours to get them on board. So, I think our process is actually very simple and straightforward.

While there is simplicity from Nutanix, what are the challenges that partners are facing?

I think there's a variety of challenges that we see. Every single partner is worried about how they drive customer delight. I think conversations have moved from making sure that there is customer success to making it extremely sticky for the partners to be with the customers, which is where the customers or rather the partner that started looking at vendors who can help them get into, not just get into an account, but also help them build a lot more adjacencies.

For example, with Nutanix, a few years back, our conversations would get limited to infra modernization or looking at it from just the lens of infrastructure. Today, I think our conversations have changed.

Today we become not just relevant around the bottom tier of how a modern data center looks like, but we also go up the value chain with our ability to be relevant in conversation where the customer wants to look at, refactoring their applications, modernizing them with container strategy and then bringing the AI element. So clearly the partners look at vendors who are able to get them, go deeper and wider into accounts.

Profitability continues to remain really critical for our partners. Our partners have given feedback to us over the last few years. They want to look at a good program that not just helps them make high front-end margins but also helps them get great back-end rebates. And the reason why they've been so vocal about it is that this helps them get the extra elbow room to go hire talent, good talents, invest in training them around Nutanix technologies and portfolios, and most importantly, reinvest in this business so that the business continues to grow.

Our profitability has been critical. Every single partner looks at great talent today, irrespective of the market. Getting a good talent is something that the partners have increasingly come and told is a concern. And it's not just about retaining talents; it's about making sure they're able to attract the right set of people, create succession plans, so on and so forth.

And last but not the least, its services. Every single partner wants to make sure that they're able to build annuity revenue when it comes to the product side of the house, and at the same time, build a more profitable line of business through services.

So, every single partner of ours, the large ones at least, have started putting together how a strong services strategy needs to be. They come back and ask us to allow maximum number of services to go through them, which we are more than happy to, because we at no point in time intend to be a services company only.

And we also look at investing in terms of how we get our partners to be ready with skills and certifications so that they're able to offer the last mile services to our customers as well, and in the process, build something which is more long-term, which is more services oriented, and obviously more profitable.

What are you hoping to achieve most this year with partners in the ASEAN region?

Number one, I just want to make sure that we continue to be seen as a company that's really channel friendly. We want to be the first choice of any single partner in the region when they think of a hybrid multi-cloud.

And the way I break this with the strategy is we want to be in conversations with partners around the infrastructure modernization piece, particularly because of what's happening with the customer side of the house, given that there's so much of uncertainty that's coming because of the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom.

I think that's a very clear opportunity, and I keep messaging this to my partners. This is a great opportunity for customers to save money and for partners to make money. And we want to do this by being 100% channel-led or a channel-first company.

Number two, we want to be elevating the conversations beyond just some modernizations and making sure that we land this message around how efficiently and how easily do we help customers to adopt a more agile, a cloud-first or a cloud-native environment, whether they want to run it on-prem using a VM construct or they want to run it in a more modern manner running Kubernetes. We've got it all.

Number three. We want to go along with our channel partners to acquire a maximum number of new customers in the region. We have two sets of partner tiers. We've got focus partners, and then we've also got growth partners, which are either managed by somebody in the team or along with the distributors.

We want all of these focus partners to make sure that they achieve their stated objectives and goals, which we lay out to them every single year. And we also work with newer set of partners, getting them integrated into Nutanix and making sure that we offer them an environment where they feel there is a lot of ease of doing business with.

With that said, what is your message to partners in the region?

The first thing that I want to go ahead and reassure our partners are that we are a channel first or a 100% partner-led company. What I mean by this is, and even if we were to double or triple our business, we do not want to go ahead and double and triple our sales force. We want to be a company that is known to work very closely with the channels and get increased contribution through our channel partners.

And this is something that we are seeing across the globe. So the number one message that I would want to give to partners, both existing as well as people who are sitting on the fence thinking whether we should go ahead with Nutanix or not, is that we will be a channel first company and within that, we want to drive this with a clear intent of driving quality over quantity. We are not here to have a greater number of partners.

We need the right number of partners, but once we sign up, we will go all in and invest with these partners to make sure that this is worth everybody's time and hence drive it with quality over quantity relentlessly.

The second message that I want to give our partners or prospects is that we've done a fabulous job when it comes to hyperconverged infrastructure. We are metamorphosing into a company which is beyond just the traditional HCI. We are relevant to hybrid multi-cloud environments.

We are extremely relevant to cloud native environments with NKP (Nutanix Kubernetes Platform) and we are also ready to go and address the AI needs of customers from an infrastructure standpoint and in the process help partners to help their customers look at modern infrastructure, look at driving innovation and look at driving scale with a lot of confidence.

And last but not least, I think the most important message that I want to give to partners in ASEAN is that we stand committed to ASEAN. We've invested in a strong local presence in most countries, and we will continue to invest in the region through building this strong local presence. We've done significant work in terms of enabling our partners, and we will continue to invest around enablement with the new partners who want to join the Nutanix board.

And most importantly, we want to be known as a channel company that helps our partners do this business profitability, do this business with a lot of trust, transparency and with a view that we are in this for a long-term commitment. So, we really want to be one of the best channel companies that our partners would ever work with.