Service Providers: Hedging against an Uncertain Future

The changes and uncertainty surrounding the market’s legacy virtualization vendor’s service provider program has left a lot of their partners scrambling. Service providers are concerned about their future because of the changes in the replacement program. 

The industry trade press has reported on the partner changes and, more specifically, the disruption in the service provider space, in great detail. For example, you can read more about it here and here. It’s no wonder folks in the service provider space are feeling disenfranchised. It has been, and continues to be, a confusing and painful time since the vendor’s acquisition closed. Unfortunately, these past events create uncertainty about changes that might come in the future – which could involve higher renewal pricing, reduced investments in innovation, less flexible terms in partner programs, or changes in support policies.

We want service providers to know that Nutanix is dedicated to helping them move forward in their business journey.

Hundreds of service providers have reached out to Nutanix over the past few months in search of a path forward. One common inquiry comes from service providers who don’t have the flexibility to walk away from previous virtualization investments but must seek other options.

Nutanix takes a structured approach to helping service providers evaluate their options. It starts with an introductory workshop where we learn about their existing environments and services and walk them through the Nutanix service provider program and the Nutanix Cloud Platform technology stack.

We go into detail with service providers about the applicability of products and technologies for their specific needs, including equivalent functionality and migration to Nutanix solutions. Our team also discusses the details of Nutanix Elevate Service Provider Program, the Service Provider consumption models, the flexibility of the Nutanix portfolio, including our products for cloud-native workloads and AI computing. 

Almost all the organizations we talk to – which includes service providers as well as large enterprises – have expressed concern about current infrastructure investments and the risk of switching to a new vendor. Even a small to midsize service provider has years of investment and experience in training, operations and integration – such as automation and monitoring – that they don’t want to discard. Given the current situation, these concerns are understandable. If the history of these types of acquisitions is any indicator, the company purchasing the legacy vendor could be counting on the sunk cost dilemma as a way to extract value from existing customers.

This is why we spend a good portion of our time upfront understanding the service provider’s current setup, including their services, engineering investments, tooling, and people. This allows us to explore together how best to move their services and existing customers to Nutanix. 

For example, the Nutanix SP team has recently worked with a large service provider to incorporate Nutanix into its new private cloud service as a starting point. This minimized the disruption to existing customers in the short term while allowing them to build expertise on Nutanix. They are also leveraging the expertise of the Nutanix professional services team to add more services and integrate with its monitoring and automation framework. 

In another situation, an Nutanix Elevate service provider partner launched plans to migrate to Nutanix as it swaps old hardware, including SAN, for Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure. This change is straightforward as their services focus on software delivery to customers. 

On a side note, Nutanix has expanded the list of supported hardware platforms (my.nutanix.com login may be required) over the past few months allowing more and more service providers to potentially leverage their existing hardware setup. 

We also spend a great deal of time early in the journey covering service provider-specific areas. This includes the areas of multitenancy and software-defined networking. For example, our service provider architects demonstrate Nutanix Cloud Platform functionality that enables multitenancy, including projects, quotas, application blueprints, and tenant marketplace.

If needed, we also walk through the concept of virtual private clouds (VPCs) and network security as enabled by the Nutanix Flow Network Security solution in the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure platform. As these conversations progress, we will involve our consulting team’s architects to go into more detail on transformation and migration, especially if the service provider is transitioning an existing setup over time. 

We realize that change can be difficult, especially when you’ve spent so much time, resources and effort into past investments. That’s why we strive to make this process as smooth and efficient as possible.

Let Nutanix get you back to business and eliminate future uncertainty. We’ll help you achieve your goals, work with you to create an efficient deployment and operations plan, and give you a smooth path to success. We’ll also discuss several new promotions as part of our commercial discussion.

Sign up here to become a Nutanix partner today. Simply select the service provider from the drop down menu and let’s get started.

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