MIAMI – Only five years into its existence, Nutanix unveiled its first vendor alliance program called Elevate at its .Next Conference.
Officially titled Elevate Technology Alliance Program, it targets application, hardware and infrastructure vendors as well as solution providers. What Nutanix is promising in the Elevate program is a technical validation process along with better access to products, a developer toolkit with APIs, marketing and sales engagements.
Out of the gate Nutanix has managed to sign two vendor partners for Elevate. F5 Networks and Commvault have confirmed they have signed on to join the Elevate program. Sudheesh Nair, vice president of worldwide sales for Nutanix, said Elevate will also target solution providers, the channel networks of those alliance vendors, and systems integrators such as Wipro and Accenture.
“You can’t build hyper-converged solutions without an ecosystem of partners and next generation platforms. For us this is all about collaboration and building. We have to build an ecosystem that enriches vendor’s own products. We now have to work with the Avaya’s, Suse Linux’ and every other product manufacturer simply and profitably with APIs that are like an App Store for the enterprise,” Nair said.
Elevate offers three levels of membership: Build, Scale and Transform. The Build level is for any business that wants to establish a partnership with Nutanix, validate its technology, and co-market the joint solution.
The Scale level enables channel partners to build more targeted solutions for specific use cases and market segments.
Finally, the Transform area further rewards partners who are committed to long-term product and sales engagements with Nutanix.
“For channel partners Elevate is about time to value and speed to market. What’s important here is that we will reduce the cost of infrastructure so partners can make more money,” Nair said.
Terry Buchanan, vice president technology and GM, of Zycom Technology, a Kingston, Ont.-based solution provider with expertise in data centre, network security, storage, virtualization and cloud, said Nutanix has become a key sales enabler for the company.
“Nutanix has helped our sales department. Without them we would not have been able to expand out west. And, now we are even going to expand into the U.S. We grew more than 200 per cent because of Nutanix last year,” Buchanan said.
Zycom has been able to at minimum double its margins with Nutanix over competing vendor products and in some case it increased by more than 50 per cent based on the deal size, Buchanan added.
What will draw interest from the channel is Elevate’s ability to validated designs for hyper-converged solutions increasing speed to market, he said.
The hyper-converged market will be a billion dollar market shortly, says Eric Sheppard, IDC market analyst.
According to IDC, it is currently growing at 116 per cent and should reach $800 million by the end of 2015. Going into 2016 the growth rate is expected to be 94 per cent and the market should pass $1.5 billion worldwide.
IDC tallies the worldwide hyper-converged infrastructure market with hardware and software combined.
