2020 has been a year like no other, filled with significant personal and economic impact for all of our Nutanix customers, partners, and employees. But 2020 was also notable for significant milestones that signaled our strengthening support for our partners. Let’s take a moment to celebrate these areas of progress that will position our partners for a successful 2021.
PARTNER EXPERIENCE
Elevate Partner Program
The foundation for partner growth must be a simple program that enables trust, transformation, and strategic profit. Nutanix Elevate was introduced in September 2020 to provide a holistic program architecture for our partner ecosystem. The program rollout began with Nutanix Elevate for Channel, with a unified program name, brand, competency-based framework, incentives, services opportunities, marketing enablement, and partner relationship management platform. In 2021, look for additional enhancements with Nutanix Elevate for Service Providers, Alliance Partners, and more.
Partner Xchange @ .NEXT Digital
Thousands of partners joined us live and on-demand, to be the first to learn about exciting program updates, company direction, and perspectives from partner and customer speakers. Most exciting of all was our first ever digital award ceremony recognizing the Partner of the Year award winners across our Channel, Alliance, and GSI partner ecosystem globally.
XPAND Enablement of Digital-First Marketing
As the pandemic shut down corporate, commercial, and public sector offices globally - partners needed to build customer awareness and education through digital means only. Partner monthly activity in the Nutanix XPAND Partner Demand Center increased 4X during early spring 2020 and has continued to be strong. Partners can get started immediately on digital-first marketing by logging in to the Nutanix Partner Portal.
Nutanix Partner Portal
One of our most exciting announcements during Partner Xchange @ .NEXT Digital was the brand-new Nutanix Partner Portal. It combines the previous partner demand center and partner portal into one platform for a unified digital experience. 2021 will be filled with even more exciting new features to make it easier for partners to access all the resources they need in their selling journey with Nutanix.
Business Insights for Ease of Doing Business
With the launch of the new Partner Portal, now Nutanix channel sales managers and their partners can have instant visibility into key metrics of partnership success. Partner individuals can view all their Nutanix deal registrations and opportunities in one place, and partner admins can view this same information for their entire organization. What this means: real-time access to key data that makes managing the business together faster, easier, and more informed. Log in to the Partner Portal to view the data relevant to your organization and role.
Test Drive for Partners
Partners are increasingly turning to Test Drive as a convenient enablement tool for Sales and SE teams alike, as well as a powerful lead-gen tool to introduce their customers to Nutanix software. As buyer journeys continue to evolve to become more digital and customer self-paced, Test Drive will become even more important to our partners in 2021. Partners can learn and get started with Test Drive by logging in to the Nutanix Partner Portal.
Partner Nutanix Connection
We continually strive to make engaging with Nutanix a rewarding experience for our partners. Partner Nutanix Connection reached a huge milestone in partner advocate community and engagement this year. Thousands of partner sales and technical professionals around the world utilize Partner Nutanix Connection as a key source of news, enablement, and rewards. Information about new eligibility requirements will be communicated in 2021. Learn more on how to join.
Partner Rebate Center
In the spirit of making it easier for our partners to do business with Nutanix, we revamped our Partner Rebate Center platform, introducing automated payment of earned incentives to our Cloud Champion and Cloud Professional partners. Learn more here and enjoy!
NEW INITIATIVES AND INCENTIVES
Nutanix Special Financial Assistance Program
As the pandemic unfolded around the world, Nutanix took steps to support our partners and their customers during an uncertain time. Launched in April 2020 as a limited time program with WW NSFAP, partners continued to close business opportunities during a period of unprecedented economic uncertainty.
Partner Incentives for FastTrack VDI
Solutions that enabled customers to deploy end user computing to address their rapidly evolving remote workforce needs were key to our partners in 2020. Earlier in the year, we launched a new global partner incentive to reward the Sales Reps and SEs at our partners who have been so pivotal to our customers’ EUC success this year. Still available through January 2021 in the Americas and EMEA, partners can log in to the Nutanix Partner Portal to learn more.
Partner Support Center
To simplify and accelerate the Nutanix selling journey for our broad channel, Nutanix launched the ground breaking Partner Support Center (PSC) for North America. These sales, technical, and marketing professionals are fully focused on the success of our partners. PSC will be coming to additional regions in 2021.
Performance+ Deal Registration
Nutanix deepened trust with partners with the new Performance+ deal registration program. The new program introduced greater predictability in software pricing for partners, and innovation in the ability for deal registration to be initiated both by our channel (CID) and by Nutanix (NID). This new system provided an important element of the new Elevate Partner Program introduced later in the year. Partners can learn more about Performance+ deal registration by logging in to the Nutanix Partner Portal.
STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS
Freedom of Choice with AMD
Nutanix customers and partners seeking additional choice in technologies powering their datacenters gained exciting new options with AMD. AMD worked closely with our ecosystem partners to deliver fully tested and validated solutions that offer outstanding performance, scalability, and TCO.
Availability of Nutanix Clusters on AWS
Customers and partners such as Penn National Insurance, Presidio, and Australian Bureau of Statistics have wanted a seamless way to span on-prem and public cloud environments without needing to repackage or rearchitect applications. With Nutanix Clusters on AWS they can do just that.
Nutanix Announces Partnership with Microsoft Azure
In the .NEXT Digital opening keynote session, Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud and AI, at Microsoft Corporation described how the collaboration gives customers flexibility and a seamless experience with hybrid Nutanix and Azure solutions. Read the announcement, including feedback from customers and partners.
Citrix Customer Success
2020 was filled with inspiring stories of customers who leveraged Citrix and Nutanix to adapt and thrive by rapidly expanding remote and hybrid work. We were pleased to announce Citrix Ready validation of Nutanix Clusters on AWS, bringing new levels of hybrid cloud choice, flexibility, and delight to customers. View this short demo that shows how Nutanix Clusters enables you to burst 2,000 Citrix Desktops to AWS in under 2 hours--simplicity and agility in action.
HPE Partnership Growth
Customer and partner adoption of the HPE ProLiant DX and HPE GreenLake cloud services for Nutanix continued to ramp in 2020. Fueled by GTM collaboration around the world, particularly through ongoing mutual channel engagement, the ability to deliver choice in on-prem and cloud services for customers is a winning combination.
Intel and Nutanix Taking Storage and Memory to New Heights
Intel technology was at the center of enhancements to the Nutanix HCI software platform. Read the blog for more on how the Nutanix cloud software stack is optimized for Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, Intel® Optane™ SSDs, Intel® 3D NAND SSDs, and Intel networking technology. These software and hardware optimizations, announced at .NEXT Digital, provide an architectural framework for workload portability and infrastructure modernization.
Celebrating 5 Years of Lenovo Partnership
The Nutanix - Lenovo partnership has grown steadily over the last 5 years. Tarkan Maner and Kirk Skaugen celebrate our progress in this blog, sharing compelling customer success stories across a range of workload and industry verticals. We want to reiterate our gratitude to Lenovo ThinkAgile HX customers and look forward to many more years of success to come.
Palo Alto Networks Global Technology Partner Award
Nutanix was honored to receive the Global Technology Partner of the Year from Palo Alto Networks at the Ignite conference in November. Given the ongoing importance of security solutions to our joint customers, this is a testament to the continued progress across the partnership, including product, sales, and marketing momentum.
Nutanix remains committed to expanding and deepening partnerships that enable our solution, services, and selling partners around the world to own a bright future with Nutanix. Thank you to all of our partners. We look forward to an even more exciting year ahead!
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