How Nutanix is transforming its channel partners into customer success partners

IT decision makers, service providers and channel resellers are dealing with an industry shift to subscription billing models from traditional sales, leasing or licensing models. “The channel really needs to move faster to everything as a service. They need to adapt really quickly to subscription, because customers are asking for this,” says Christian Alvarez, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Channels for Nutanix.

Enterprises are building the future of their businesses on hybrid multi-cloud IT operations, which blends private and public cloud services. That requires interoperability and automation, across different technologies and services. “This shift in customer expectations and cloud acceleration is leading service providers into new partnerships,” says Alvarez.

Channel partners cannot do this alone. Scaling a business and sustaining profitability requires partnerships that give customers a simpler way to drive their digital transformation. That involves consulting, design, new products, integration, customisation and 24×7 support.

Elevate Service Provider Programme

Partnerships can provide the expertise needed to promote, sell, design, integrate, customise, deploy and support new applications on-premises, in the public cloud or in hybrid cloud architectures. They allow providers to expand their offerings to include services like managed security, IoT solutions and analytics to differentiate themselves.

That is what is behind the Nutanix Elevate Service Provider Programme. It helps providers pursue partnerships that can improve customer experiences, competitiveness and profitability. There is no minimum commitment or cost to service providers to join the programme, which allows partners of all sizes to participate.

Many customers are making their on-premises IT capabilities work with different public cloud services. The partnerships are critical for ensuring interoperability and reliability, which are essential to IT teams, especially as they move to hybrid multi-cloud operations.

Business-customer transitions from IT capital expenditures to subscriptions and consumption-based operational costs are blurring the lines between system integrators, software vendors and service providers. Multiple vendors may be responsible for a single customer experience.

Going forward service providers and resellers will be redesigning their sales, post-sales and support approaches to address cloud and distributed enterprise solutions, especially as customers have had to embrace more distributed architectures to reach remote-work employees.

Partnerships are proving especially useful to customers moving to the cloud for the first time. By working together, partners can give customers confidence that they will be supported by a broad array of professionals working together to uphold clear service-level agreements, in the cloud. Partner ecosystems can also help customers sort through the complexity of what applications, networks, cloud services, storage solutions and other IT components they need.

Elevate Distributor Programme

“The Elevate Distributor Programme is going to significantly enhance the resellers experience, not just with us, but also with the distributors,” says Alvarez. Also, with distributor’s ability to have enhanced incentives by ticking all the right boxes – showing growth, leveraging performance-plus deal registration that is all built around trust, alignment and growth — distribution can go back and enhance their own incentives model back into the reseller program.

Distributor Champion

Nutanix is also investing a significant amount of money, along with its distribution partners, in order for them to become a Distributor Champion, which is the highest tiered level and has the highest earning potential. “These distributors have to be integrated with us and have a tight secured B2B integration via API’s,” says Alvarez.

Nutanix resellers will now be able to point and click to get a quote or get a renewals quote with the highest level of accuracy and speed. “This B2B integration is about time, accuracy and velocity,” points out Alvarez.

Channel Autonomy

“Channel Autonomy is one of our key objectives when it comes to our channel program. Nutanix wishes to empower our channel ecosystem so that they can independently drive our business with minimal involvement from our sales team,” says Alvarez.

Nutanix has spent the past two years shifting resellers away from legacy sales and compensation models, and the Elevate programme launched last September has accelerated this. The program emphasises expertise and capability over size and pays on a recurring-revenue basis.

Nutanix has moved away from a traditional tiered partner programme to a 100% competency-based programme that will help channel partners drive more profitability. Nutanix has introduced a concept called disaggregating the incentive stack that motivates partners to sell more and keeps them in better touch with their customers.

What is more important than the initial sale is the lifetime value of a customer. From that perspective, Nutanix could reward partners with premium incentives along the lifetime of the customers journey — at point of sale, at activation, at renewal, at expansion, or at another point. The goal is basically assuring that the customer is going to get the most value out of their investments. “This is an incredible way for partners to potentially earn more incentives,” stresses Alvarez.

Legacy sales methods and incentive models are quickly becoming a thing of the past. As customers move to consume IT products as a subscription service rather than a one-time purchase event, vendors will face pressure and opportunity to align partner incentives with that of the customer’s lifetime journey.

Nutanix thinks that disaggregating the incentive stack will create more sustained value for customers. Nutanix is exploring how we can incentivise partners throughout the full lifetime of a customer’s engagement with us.

Vendor alliances

Nutanix anticipates that the alliance landscape will see even more examples of vendors finding common ground as demand grows for more complete, multi-technology solutions. Alliances will be driven by not only customers of today, but the customers of tomorrow as the technology landscape drives innovation but also more complexity.

This is not a new trend – Nutanix forged strategic relationships with Red Hat and Citrix which have both proved to be of great value to partners with solutions that are certified and supported together. Nutanix continues to support VMware ESXi and Horizon View, to enable customer choice.

Nutanix partners with AWS and Microsoft Azure because cloud is no longer a destination but a collection of capabilities that customers want to work together seamlessly as a hybrid environment.

Next level of skill sets

Future-minded channel organisations are actively looking at DevOps as one of the next practices to drive differentiation and growth. Low code, no code development methodologies will transform solution delivery – slashing engagement time and costs, and thus providing a significant competitive edge.

Those organisations that build these practices will not only gain new customers but will attract the next wave of digital-native channel professionals entering the workforce embracing these new approaches. This will become a new source of vibrancy, innovation, and growth for organisations.

Snapshot

Scaling a business and sustaining profitability requires partnerships that give customers a simpler way to drive their digital transformation.
Many customers are making their on-premises IT capabilities work with different public cloud services.
The partnerships are critical for ensuring interoperability and reliability, which are essential to IT teams.
Business-customer relationships transitions from IT capital expenditures to consumption-based costs are blurring the lines between system integrators, software vendors and service providers.
Multiple vendors may be responsible for a single customer experience.
Partnerships are proving especially useful to customers moving to the cloud for the first time.
Partner ecosystems can also help customers sort through the complexity of what IT components they need.
Nutanix has spent the past two years shifting resellers away from legacy compensation models, and the Elevate programme accelerated this.
Legacy sales methods and incentive models are quickly becoming a thing of the past.
The Elevate program emphasises expertise and capability over size and pays on a recurring-revenue basis.
Nutanix has moved away from a traditional tiered partner programme to a 100% competency-based programme.
Nutanix has introduced a concept called disaggregating the incentive stack that motivates partners to sell more and keeps them in better touch with their customers.
What is more important than the initial sale is the lifetime value of a customer.
Nutanix could reward partners with premium incentives along the lifetime of the customer’s journey.
Nutanix thinks that disaggregating the incentive stack will create more sustained value for customers.
Alliances will be driven by not only customers of today, but the customers of tomorrow.
The technology landscape will drive innovation and also more complexity.
Future-minded channel organisations are actively looking at DevOps as one of the next practices to drive differentiation and growth.
Low code, no code development methodologies will transform solution delivery.
Nutanix forged strategic relationships with Red Hat and Citrix which have both proved to be of great value.
Nutanix continues to support VMware ESXi and Horizon View, to enable customer choice.
Nutanix partners with AWS and Microsoft Azure because cloud is no longer a destination but a collection of capabilities.