Navigating Change Together: Nutanix Delivers VMware Alternative

Sydney Neely Partners, the tech world is no stranger to change, but uncertainty can still shake even the firmest foundations. With VMware’s recent changes under Broadcom, some partners might feel they’re left searching for solid ground. Joining me to share how Nutanix is providing stability for partners right now is Dave Gwyn. Hi Dave! Dave Gwyn Hey, Sydney. How are you doing? Sydney Neely Doing great. Now, Dave, how is Nutanix actively supporting partners in navigating the recent developments surrounding VMware? Dave Gwyn First, we recognize this isn't a standard bump in the road for our partners, right? This is a serious, meaningful impact for them. Many partners had critical revenue streams that were related to VMware and the Broadcom acquisition is having a pretty serious impact on them. We take it very seriously. We put ourselves in the shoes of our partners and we are genuinely asking ourselves what can we do as a vendor to provide an alternative that takes away their risk and offers them a new way forward. Sydney Neely What are some key benefits Nutanix brings to the table for partners who are considering a transition? Dave Gwyn Our partner program, is called Elevate, it was it was awarded a five star rating in 2024 from The Channel Company. We've done a lot of work on that program over the last year. We've improved our partner profitability on the front end and on the back end. So better margin, better rebates. We doubled individual SPIFs so that the sales folks and the technical folks and our partners are incentivized in the same way that the executives are at our partner companies. We created an autonomous segment that we call Channel Led. It's got a $10 billion addressable market and tens of thousands of accounts in that segment, and we're paying our partners additional rebates as they focus on accounts in that segment, asking for their autonomous selling there and increasing the profitability when they behave as a true force multiplier for us at Nutanix. You know that we're a subscription company, so land and expand, all of what I just said applies. But you also have to think about renewals. And so we've made renewals more profitable and we've done that to really encourage our partners to be able to take advantage of the full lifetime value that a customer represents. So we and they become interested in driving adoption because of that renewals are profitable to our partners as our follow on expand deals because we always have had high return purchase multiples and we've averaged a 90 net promoter score for the last seven years. So we've got great customer satisfaction that tends to lead to consistent renewals and a lot of expand sales. Sydney Neely Partners want the switch to be as seamless as possible. So in the face of change, how do you ensure a smooth transition process for those looking to adopt your platform? Dave Gwyn We've rolled out a migration program and whether our partners want to move from VSAN or from EXSI to AHV in full or in part, we've got a migration program that provides one year of Nutanix licensing free that's transacted as a one time discount to our to our customers via our partners. And then we also include deployment and migration services for migrating workloads from VSAN or ESX to Nutanix Cloud platform. And we have that performed by our partners that our partners can use their own services organizations to do it. I think the key to this also is to have a product that actually fits. You can't swap out ESX and plug in some random, you know, firewall or whatever. You have to have an applicable product and our applicable product, called AHV, is a battle tested enterprise grade hypervisor. It's a great alternative to ESX has been for a long time. So our partners and our customers feel comfortable that they've got a product that truly can be plugged in and used in both private cloud and the public cloud for virtualized or containerized workloads. Sydney Neely Some great benefits for partners looking to make that change. Thank you, Dave, for joining me. Dave Gwyn My pleasure., Sydney. Thanks for having me. Sydney Neely If you would like to learn more about Nutanix and their partner program, check out the website below. For The Channel Company, I'm Sydney Neely. Thanks for watching.