Nutanix encouraging partners to develop HCI skills

Nutanix is encouraging channel partners to skill up and get involved with selling hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) to take advantage of some of the higher value services that customers are looking for.

The firm has been extending the reach of its HCI offering and last month struck a deal with HPE to get its Enterprise Cloud OS software included on the vendor's GreenLake subscription offering using its Apollo and ProLiant servers. It has followed that up with plans to make Nutanix available on AWS.

At the same time the firm has been making it clear that the channel plays a key role in its go-to-market and has been extending its partner support over the last few months having launched its Power to the Partner charter at the end of last summer, moving to a model that gave rewards on the basis of investments in the vendor, rather than just revenues.

Partners keen to get the top rewards will clearly be focused on making sure they are meeting customer needs and maintaining revenues and getting that result could involve moving away from some of the low value services.

Speaking to a colleague from ComputerWeekly at the Nutanix .Next conference in Anaheim, Rajiv Mirani, Nutanix CTO cloud platforms, said the market was changing and there were challenges for partners.

"The channel in some senses also has to evolve because the simple services that they used to make money on, like deployment and migration services, I think with increased automation that low hanging fruit goes away," he said.

"There is always a lot value added services in building a solution stack with infrastructure, applications that is entirely managed by software. There is a lot of potential over there but they need to evolve beyond just simple services," he added.

He said that customers were driving the demand for HCI and the channel would need to be in a position to react to that and make sure they could deliver the support users were after.