Nutanix focused on the needs of ASEAN customers

“We will always have to look at it (ASEAN) very differently from any other country, any other region when it comes to managing partners. We have to be very flexible. We've got to be able to adopt a wide range of tactics based on customer needs and based on technical readiness,” says Harsh Vaishnav, Senior Director and Head of Channels for ASEAN, Hong Kong, India, and SAARC at Nutanix.

Nutanix is looking to continue its success in 2025 by giving customers simplicity and what they need most in their AI journey. The tech vendor generated US$670 million in revenue during its first fiscal year quarter of 2026.

Rajiv Ramaswami, CEO of Nutanix, foresees 2026 to be the year that businesses move from AI-first to AI-smart. As part of CRN’s CEO Outlook 2026 project, Ramaswami stated that Nutanix will be having much more robust and mature conversations about where AI actually makes sense in enterprises’ tech stacks.

Looking at the ASEAN region, Harsh Vaishnav, Senior Director and Head of Channels for ASEAN, Hong Kong, India, and SAARC at Nutanix explained that the vendor has mapped out a journey for its customers to ensure they get the best outcomes with Nutanix in their AI journey.

“Our customers are more than ever looking to modernize their core infrastructure and look at a platform that essentially helps them run any application, any workload, anywhere at scale. And this is where the underpinnings of our overall hybrid cloud strategy come to the fore with a product or a platform called the Nutanix Cloud Platform,” said Vaishnav.

Not only is Nutanix seeing increased demands on Nutanix Cloud Platform in the region, Vaishnav pointed out that they are also now seeing customers looking to either extend workloads into the public cloud or migrate workloads from a public cloud to on-prem.

“Customers expect us to give them a platform that helps them maintain consistency with what they have on-prem, and at the same time making sure that all of this becomes operationally very easy. So, this is where we've got a fabulous product called Nutanix Cloud Clusters. That's actually seeing a lot of traction,” he said.

Vaishnav added that customers in ASEAN are looking to modernize their infrastructure and move to an app-modernized world. This is where he sees a significant traction going at this point in time.

“We see Kubernetes as the underpinnings of a great AI and a modern cloud-native application landscape. Our partners are seeing a clear opportunity to work in this area, to be able to help our customers to run cloud-native, as well as VM-based workloads together with a common infrastructure that makes standing up, consuming, managing, and monitoring the entire infrastructure very easy,” explained Vaishnav.

Specifically, Vaishnav stated that there is clear governance when it comes to a multi-cloud or hybrid multi-cloud environment.

“With the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP), this is clearly a very critical area of growth that we foresee. We believe that NKP will become either as big as our existing Nutanix AOS (Acropolis Operating System) business, or we believe that this has got the actual opportunity to actually be a bigger business than the Nutanix AOS business as well,” said Vaishnav

On the adoption of AI with Nutanix Enterprise AI, Vaishnav shared that Nutanix enables partners to support their customers to be able to deploy and run AI applications at scale, across environments, securely and with a great control of how they manage operations, how they run governance, and most importantly, how do they manage their data.

“So, these are the four areas that I would believe are areas where we as well as our partners see the biggest opportunity in the region,” he added.

Migrating VMware customers

Apart from those four focus areas, Vaishnav stated that Nutanix also continues to have increasing conversations around infrastructure modernization, especially in app modernization with VMware customers.

“We see VMware by Broadcom giving something what I like to call the sticker shock, particularly around licensing, around renewals, and the lack of cost predictability. And that is clearly a big concern for our customers. And we've seen this in terms of the number of new customers that we have been able to onboard in the last one year globally, as well as within the region,” Vaishnav said.

Vaishnav shared that about 50% of the new customers that Nutanix has been able to add consistently over the last few quarters has actually come from customers who have looked at Nutanix to be the safe harbor to get them out of the turmoil that they are in.

“And we are also very clear that any transition tech or business is something that we've got to sort of capitalize on. And I think we've been able to capitalize on this to an extent. We continue to invest around this area, we continue to sort of work with partners who are with us or who have been challenged by VMware very recently with the changes that they've made to the channel policies and landscape. And we see our partners get a far more consistent, a better visible sort of way of engaging with Nutanix. And that's the reason why we're seeing a big spurt,” he explained.

Customers and partners in ASEAN

For Vaishnav, ASEAN is anyways an overflowing pot of various different cultures and different countries. Hence, Nutanix believes that there's no single way to look at this as a single market.

“It is a multi-speed digital economy. We see some markets who are still going through the whole transition process from traditional infrastructure to a hybrid multi-cloud environment. Whereas the others are actually ahead of the curve when it comes to adopting advanced technologies like AI, automation and even cloud native technologies. This means we will always have to look at it very differently from any other country, any other region when it comes to managing partners. We have to be very flexible. We've got to be able to adopt a wide range of tactics based on customer needs and based on technical readiness,” said Vaishnav.

On ensuring partners are enabled to work with customers at the different levels of their journey, Vaishnav pointed out that Nutanix has aligned its partner enablement and certification programs closely to what’s happening on the ground from the customer side.

“We also see a lot of diversity based on regulatory environments as well. There are partners who operate in different countries where we see different macroeconomic environments and different political environments. And then there are partners who operate in multiple markets. With those partners, we've also got to be very clear and be a little differentiated. We've got to make sure that we focus on what is really important for them at that point in time for the markets that they want to go after,” he said.

This means helping partners not just certify talent but also helping them attract good talent with Nutanix’s abilities to enable the partners and skilling them.

“Most importantly, we make sure that our plans are aligned to what's really happening on the ground. That's how we go about building this with our partners and making sure that we are relevant to what the customers ask for,” he concluded.