Tarkan Maner On VMware Competition And Nutanix’s HPE Partnership Hitting ‘Warp Speed’

Nutanix’s chief commercial officer, Tarkan Maner, is bullish about his company’s future thanks to its innovation road map and growing strategic partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise aimed at giving customers more hybrid cloud choice over competitors like VMware.

“What is very important is our flexibility and choice,” said Maner, who leads Nutanix’s global business development and corporate development efforts as well as strategic partnerships, in an interview with CRN. “We are hypervisor-agnostic. We have our own hypervisor with AHV, but we still support [VMware] ESXi as well as [Microsoft] Hyper-V. So customers and channel partners have multiple choices.”

The San Jose, Calif.-based hyperconverged and hybrid cloud software star unveiled a new Database-as-a-Service offering alongside HPE GreenLake’s consumption-based as-a-service offering this week. Furthermore, Maner told CRN that all of Nutanix’s emerging products on HPE hardware will eventually become available on HPE GreenLake.

“Every single emerging product is going to be available [on HPE GreenLake] as we move forward—that’s the plan,” said Maner.

Nutanix’s Maner talks to CRN about his company’s growing partnership with HPE, competition with VMware and the channel partner opportunities around Nutanix’s new Database-as-a-Service offering.