2021 was a hugely eventful year, filled with tremendous partnership accomplishments and wins.
We have been through a roller coaster these past twelve months, and have emerged with a few truths - that work has evolved from remote to hybrid models, that together we can adapt and thrive amidst new challenges that come our way, and that IT plays an important role in helping customers in all of the above.
Let’s celebrate just a few examples of why it’s never been a better time to be a Nutanix Partner.
Elevate Partner Program
Designed to provide a holistic program architecture for the entire Nutanix partner ecosystem - the Elevate program celebrated its 1 year anniversary earlier this year. Let’s review the enhancements that further expand its benefits to our partners.
- Elevate for Resellers: The FY22 program enhanced the partner profit continuum, with incentives for expansion deals up to 270 days after the initial deal with a net new account. Also in FY22, Authorized level partners became eligible for incentives when landing new customers. Performance+ Deal Registration continues to be the foundation for field engagement and pricing advantages, and the program continues to be grounded in a competency based approach to prepare with partners for the move to subscription.
- Elevate for Service Providers: This new program empowers service providers to deliver profitable and differentiated Nutanix powered services -- from private and hybrid cloud to Desktop and user applications as a service to managed business critical applications. Key elements of the multi-tier program include new logo incentives, Performance+ deal registration, enhanced support for building and launching new services, and more.
- Elevate for Distributors: Unique within the industry, this additional program track is designed specifically for top Distributors, who achieve competencies to deliver better onboarding and support for the Nutanix broad channel.
- Partner Portal & XPAND Demand Center: Since the launch of a revamped experience last year, active partners have climbed by approx. 3.5x and leads generated have grown by approx. 2x year on year. If you haven’t already, visit the Nutanix Partner Portal for a one-stop shop for partner content, enablement, and lead gen resources -- plus all of your individual and partner account specific deal registrations, opportunities, and certifications in a single platform.
- Award Winning Program: We’re grateful and proud for Nutanix to be included in the 2021 CRN 5-star Partner Program Guide.
- Refreshed NCSR/NCSE Partner Certifications: Market needs have evolved, and so have our partner certification offerings. Nutanix Certified Sales Representative (NCSR) 2022 features a much more focused learning path for busy sales professionals. Nutanix Certified Systems Engineer (NCSE) Core program features fully refreshed technical content reflecting the new product portfolio. And, NCS services certifications became the most popular certification path last year. If you haven’t already, it’s well worth a look to refresh your certifications so you can bring the latest knowledge to your customer conversations
Solutions Go-to-Market
Nutanix has continued to deepen our focus on key solutions across product development; internal and partner enablement; customer journey focused campaigns; service offerings; and more. This strengthens not only our relevance with our channel partners, but is also strengthened by strategic alliance technologies. Ultimately, all of this goodness means that partners can deliver more holistic, ecosystem-encompassing solutions for customers, such as this example in EMEA. Here are some other exciting solutions with our partners:
- Nutanix Clusters Availability on AWS GovCloud (US): With this solution, Federal agencies and other public sector organizations have an option to significantly accelerate their cloud adoption, without needing to re-architect mission critical applications - providing an easy path to a unified hybrid cloud environment.
- Citrix Partnership: The two companies announced that Nutanix will be a preferred choice for HCI, hybrid and multi cloud deployments of Citrix products; and Citrix will be the preferred enterprise end user computing solution on the Nutanix Cloud Platform. The greater integration of product, support, and go to market intended from this strategic collaboration means greater success for Citrix & Nutanix mutual partners to achieve hybrid work models for customers.
- Nutanix Mine Partners: Commvault joined as a key supporting technology partner, in addition to HYCU & Veeam. Now, partners can provide even more data protection choice to their Nutanix customer environments.
- HPE GreenLake with Nutanix Era: Customers can achieve new levels of database management simplicity with the transformative Era technology now available via HPE GreenLake. For partners this provides the opportunity to unlock cost efficiency and transform mission critical database operations.
- Lenovo TruScale for Hosted Desktops with Nutanix: Available in US, one of the industry’s only end to end solutions inclusive of datacenter and end user hardware devices and software, and encompassing professional services - providing new options to deliver EUC (end user computing) as a service.
- Nutanix Clusters on Microsoft Azure®: At the .NEXT Digital Conference, partners and customers were able to attend keynote, breakout, and demo sessions showcasing how to build a hybrid cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft Azure.
- Red Hat Partnership: Customers and partners want freedom of choice of solutions that are vendor certified and supported. Nutanix and Red Hat recently announced fully certified solutions inclusive of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift, along with coordinated technical support. This provides partners a best-in-class open hybrid cloud stack for your customers
- Supermicro Joins Nutanix Elevate Reseller Program: A global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking, and green computing technology, Supermicro became an authorized reseller partner to address the increasing market demand for hybrid multicloud platforms
Market Leadership
Nutanix always strives to deliver customer and partner delight, so that we can be your partner of choice to build your business on. We hope you have seen plenty of proof points throughout the past year, and look to even more in the coming year ahead.
- A Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software: In case you missed it, Nutanix was recently recognized for the 5th year in a row. Nutanix Partners play a critical role in both Nutanix vision (enabling key solution and hybrid multicloud innovations) and execution (delivering customer reach, value, and success). We thank our partners, and invite you to share the great news with your customers!
- Nutanix Test Drive: The use cases supported in the Test Drive experience, as well as customer and partner adoption - continued to climb in the past year. Partners can now leverage Test Drive to generate new customer leads directly into their organizations with Test Drive.
- Nutanix Cloud Bundles: EMEA partners have leveraged these packaged solutions to simplify and accelerate your customer conversations. Now is the time to act, to leverage the program before its end on December 31, 2021.
- IDC Ranks Nutanix as #1 Market Share Leader: You can be sure that you are introducing industry-leading technology to your customers with Nutanix. In its refreshed Software-Defined Infrastructure Tracker in June 2021, Nutanix was identified by IDC as having 25% of the prior year Software-Defined Storage Controller Software market, significantly ahead of the next vendor at 15%.
- Nutanix NPS (Net Promoter Scores): Market share is simply the outcome of happy customers. Customers have rated Nutanix at 90 average NPS for seven consecutive years - based on their responses to the question “would you recommend Nutanix to a colleague”. That is an incredibly powerful measure of customer sentiment, and we are so grateful. We are equally excited to leverage the NPS methodology in our channel business. Partners have rated Nutanix at best-in-class Partner NPS levels overall last year, and we hope to continue to keep that pulse on your feedback to continue to improve our partner programs.
- Partner Xchange: Hybrid work also meant hybrid celebrations! A record number of partners tuned in digitally to the Partner Xchange experience to be informed and inspired by Nutanix and industry leaders such as leading cybersecurity expert Theresa Payton, and to brush up on key topics such as Solution Plays, Nutanix Sizer, and Services competency building. We were also excited to see so many of you come out to the local Partner Xchange events in person, in select cities.
- Partners of the Year: It’s always a special moment when we recognize the partners who went above and beyond. A warm congratulations to this year’s winners!
All of this progress provides an important foundation for partners into next year and beyond - to build your future, together. Happy Holidays to all of our valued Nutanix Partners!
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