Nutanix .NEXT Summit: Three key takeaways for Nutanix partners

“Nutanix is no longer just a hyperconverged story. It's a platform story, and the compute is just as important as the storage,” says Dave Gwyn, SVP of Worldwide Channels at Nutanix.

The Nutanix .Next summit in Chicago this year saw an even greater number of partners and customers come together to listen, network and share their success stories with the vendor. Indeed, Nutanix has come a long way since its inception and today continues to see positive growth with around 500 to 1000 new customers coming in every quarter.

Among the customers that shared their success story with Nutanix this year include Western Union, Everland from Korea, Wynn North America and more. Enabling these customers in their journey with Nutanix is the vendor’s partner ecosystem.

With Nutanix continuing to see an influx of partners, Dave Gwyn, SVP Worldwide Channels at Nutanix shared three key important takeaways for partners that were discussed throughout the summit.

First, Gwyn shared that partners need to understand that Nutanix is no longer just a HCI vendor as it always has been in the past. As the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) has been around for a while and looking at the announcements made around agentic AI, Kubernetes and the ability to run Nutanix AOS as a containerized operating system or as a virtualized operating system, clearly shows that the vendor is now a platform.

“We really need our partners to shift to that orientation where they're thinking platform and where they're talking to their customers and prospects about Nutanix being the platform on which their partners deploy virtualized workloads, containerized workloads, and then the AI on top of either one of those,” Gwyn said.

The second takeaway is on the readiness for the current state of the market. Gwyn pointed out that the biggest issue now is the supply chain challenges that everyone's experiencing. With the hardware having significant impact on the deployment of software, the timing of availability of hardware, cost of hardware is driving people to make different decisions.

“Nutanix is ready for that in terms of the portability of our licenses, where it can run, telling our customers that they don't necessarily have to run on-prem with the hardware that they're ordering or waiting on. They can run in the cloud or they can run with our service providers, and they can do that while they wait for their hardware if they wish, and then they can port out without having to refactor their applications if they want to move from a cloud location to an on-prem location or even to an edge location,” he explained.

Gwyn also shared that Nutanix is trying to separate software transactions very distinctly from hardware transactions that have traditionally been coupled for Nutanix.

“So rather than having all of the full transaction wait on the timing of the hardware, in order for our partners to be able to monetize a transaction, and similarly for us, we'll do the software orders and we'll go ahead and ship so that we can keep the transaction flow moving on the software side in spite of the hardware not moving. Perhaps to run it in a cloud location or something like that, but also even if the customer is waiting on the hardware, we're giving free of charge periods to our customers so that we can at least keep that side of the business moving, get the licenses out there so that whenever the hardware gets there. It's ready, but also all of us are still able to monetize the transaction and have the cash flow associated with that,” he said.

The third takeaway is to recognize the size of the channel ecosystem as compared to the size that it was maybe six or seven years ago.

“We've invested a lot in expanding our ecosystem, not just from the standpoint of resellers and distributors, but more so, probably more importantly, from the alliances standpoint, and other ISVs with whom we're tightly partnered. That really expands our ability to when we say run anywhere, to really back that up and run anything anywhere. So, if you look at our partner expo at .Next, it's just very big. It's significantly larger than anything I remember at .NEXT, but that really avails our partners to be able to say yes to their customers,” Gwyn said.

Gwyn also pointed out that there has been a very significant increase in the size of the hardware compatibility list as well as the number of servers that we run on that we're certifying.

“We're moving faster than ever as far as rapid certification of server platforms and broader sets of chips and things like that that we'll support. But we've also added external storage last year with the announcements with EverPure, and Dell Technologies and now with NetApp. That opens a very large market, and we also announced Lenovo servers, which opens up more market.”

As such, Gwyn said that the intent there is to be able to talk to a customer that has existing assets and say they can run on that rather than needing to migrate to something new, or wait on the hardware, deal with the increased costs in the supply chain, and such.

“External storage is now a way of life for Nutanix, and that just circles back to point number one, which is not about HCI anymore. It's no longer a hyperconverged story. It's a platform story, and the compute is just as important as the storage,” Gwyn said.

Updating the Elevate program

Gwyn also shared that Nutanix is currently in the process of updating the Elevate Partner Program for its partners for the fiscal year 2027.

“What we're thinking is that it's time for us to orient our incentives around platform sales and adoption. So, we're going to build a program that rewards our partners who are doing all of land, expand, and renew because those three are indicators that a partner is buying the platform, adopting the platform, expanding on their licenses as well as coming back and renewing,” he said.

Gywn explained that Nutanix is seeing success and value from those partners and are looking for the best kind of land, expand, and renew.

“We're looking for partners who don't just sell our core product, but sell our other products as well when they do a new logo. They come back and they do an expand deal, but they don't just sell more licenses, they maybe sell a new workload. And when they do a renewal, they don't necessarily renew the same term; maybe they expand the term, maybe they add and expand when they're doing the renewal. So, there's various of what good looks like with land, expand, and renew, and that's the other thing that we're going to reward,” he said.

For Premier Partners, Gywn pointed out that these partners are on top of the Elevate pyramid at this point.

“Our Premier partners have grown by 5x in the last year. Those are the partners that truly show the greatest commitment to Nutanix. They make massive dollar commitments to the business that they're going to do with us and to the certifications they're going to have with us. By stepping up to that commitment, they've really enabled me to invest back in the channel and for me to be able to go to our board and to our C-level execs and say, we need more investment for the channel, and successfully get it,” he concluded.