Nutanix’s Michael Magura on why partners are excited about Service Provider Central

Nutanix Service Provider Central enables multi-tenancy, governance, as well as self-service within the Nutanix Cloud Platform in a single pane of glass for service providers, which the vendor believes is going to define what multi-tenancy should be.

At the Nutanix .NEXT summit in Chicago, Nutanix unveiled new enhancements to the Nutanix Elevate Service Provider Program that enables multitenant cloud capabilities through the Nutanix Service Provider Central program. Designed to help partners scale and differentiate their services, Service Provider Central aims to provide a clear path for disenfranchised VMware Cloud Service Provider partners to continue offering profitable services to their customers.

Specifically what Nutanix Service Provider Central does is really enabling multi-tenancy, governance, as well as self-service within the Nutanix Cloud Platform in a single pane of glass for service providers. Service providers will be able to use this hardware for multiple tenants. Nutanix believes that this is going to be quite defined as multi-tenancy should be and are really excited about it.

In a conversation with CRN Asia, Michael Magura believes that Service Provider Central is becoming like a need to have offering, especially in the APAC region.

“If you look at like the broad message of what Nutanix offers now, if you are sitting in a situation where you're going to make a choice on-prem, off-prem, hyperscaler, public cloud, SP, public cloud, you're going to sit on a external storage or you're going to sit on a hyperconverged infrastructure. And whatever you're deciding to do, you got to decide where you have the most options,” said Magura.

For Magura, the solution provider offering coupled with the migration coming from Broadcom as well as the hardware supply chain issues that are starting to rise, these two problems right now are driving partners to look at where else can help prospects or existing customers.

For example, Magura explained if a customer wants to put a new application in, they need hardware and server to run the application as well as the licenses. However, given the delays in supply chain for hardware, where else can they put the application? He said that customers can choose to go to the public cloud but it could be expensive in the long run.

“So the option they have now is to work with our resellers who are starting their service provider business and able to give that offering. They're doing simple migrations over and they may even convince the customer to start peeling off some of these applications since they have a hardware constraint at their own pace” Magura said.

One partner that has done this is Think Solutions in Australia. The partner gave customers the flexibility to do things where and at the pace that they want to. Over in India, Magura added that in the last six months, Nutanix has had at least six resellers in the country become service providers.

“So we have agreements in our Elevate program. One is the reseller contract. Then one is the Nutanix Elevate Service Provider Program. So, our resellers will become a service provider and they'll start up their own SP services. We’ve had a couple in India, Australia, Korea and parts of Southeast Asia. So we do see it happening as the model allows them to be flexible,” he said.

He believes what drives this is the multi-tenancy capabilities in Service Provider Central that lets customers manage workloads in whichever places they want.

Interestingly, Dave Gwyn pointed out that while a lot value-added resellers have now become service providers, Nutanix has also witnessed a lot of former Broadcom service providers that are coming our way.

“Broadcom has really just been all over the map with regards to their BCSP 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,” said Gwyn.

What partners say

Ken Kanamaru, a partner from Clara in Japan, shared with CRN Asia shared that Service Provider Central is good for them as they have been offering these kind of services for almost a decade.

“We recently faced a problem with end users that have to renew their hardware. So we had to propose a completely new hardware to customers and we force our customers to pay more money. This was really painful for both our company and our users. So that's why that update from Nutanix is so nice for us. It’s easier to manage the deliverables and the requirements by customers. It also allows us to plan a long-term offering with customers,” said Kanamaru.

Kanamaru added that Clara works with both AWS and Alibaba Cloud as well and customers have the choice when it comes to moving their VMs.

“So, we have to focus on making sure they are using the right way. We can make sure that they are growing the number of the VMs so that we hopefully can migrate this group of VMs, to the dedicated clusters in the future. So that's our strategy for now,” he added.

For Pedro Duarte, Think Solutions sales director, an Australian MSP, the partnership with Nutanix has evolved from just being a reseller to providing MSP experiences to customers.

“For us at the moment, AI is a big discussion across our customer base. So we've got a lot of customers that have come to us and have said, look, we know we need to do something. We don't know how to tackle it internally. How can you help us? So for us, as now a service provider, we're looking at the agentic AI announcements and the platform that Nutanix has built around Nutanix AI as really a landing point for those customers to play before they actually make the decision to go off and do it themselves,” he said.

Duarte also shared that Think Solutions has been having a lot of proof of concept engagements with customers where they're just getting a taste of what that platform looks like and then evolving them themselves in their conversations.

“Obviously, with all the disruption, it also gives us options for customers to be able to say, 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 know how to tackle it,” Duarte said.

With customers still concerned about AI budgets but intend to run AI applications, the Nutanix offering allows them to replicate storage and then bring up an environment in the cloud, when and if needed. This he said has been really valuable to the overall state of customer experience.

Another partner, ITS Integra, has been a service provider for almost a decade. Jan Gabriel, Head of Alliances & Marketing at ITS Integra shared that 85% of its servie is running on Nutanix AHV and it was extremely important for them to have an industrialized sort of services approach.

“The fact that we're talking platform rather than three-tiered architectures and server gear and storage there, it's super important for us. Unified support is also super important. It's cost-efficient, obviously. You only call one supplier, not three, who usually throw the balls at each other. Solutions Provicer Central is, of course, a very valuable source of information for us. It's something we were kind of really hoping for, because we're navigating in a complicated ecosystem. There's a lot of different contracts, different types of licenses, different types of subscriptions,” he said.

Gabriel believes it's really important to have this centralized information and be able to share that with the Nutanix teams also. It's important also for the co-selling approach with the Nutanix teams, be able to work on the same deals, have the same information at the same time, and just be able to go through that.