Nutanix refreshes referral programme to cover all aspects of buying cycle

Nutanix has cut the ribbon on a referral programme for channel partners that offers rewards across the complete lifecycle of a project.

The hybrid cloud specialist decided its innovative Elevate Partner Programme needed a refresh to ensure partners involved with deals but not necessarily in sealing the final transaction were recognised and rewarded.

The firm is aiming to use the changes to make sure it can work with every partner type and reward those that are involved at different stages of the buying journey, particularly those involved in helping the user develop their strategies before they settle on the final purchase order.

“Analysts talk about how customers engage with at least seven partners across the lifecycle of any project and there are multiple touchpoints. Despite this, vendors have traditionally tended to only concern themselves with and reward the partners involved in actual transactions, forgetting the whole ecosystem around each deal and how it comes to life,” said Adam Tarbox, vice-president of EMEA channel sales at Nutanix.

“We’re changing that, and our new Referral Program is intended to reward more of our partners who are involved across the process – especially those who help customers to shape their strategies in the early stages of any project and support them through the buying process,” he added.

Nutanix has been actively supporting partners in recent weeks, and last month launched Cloud Bundles to arm partners with a fresh proposition to put in front of customers.

The firm is looking to make it easier for partners to help customers choose options around its Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and the bundles should make it more streamlined for the channel.

The vendor is offering three bundles – starter, pro and ultimate – for the channel to choose from.

The starter option provides customers with the core components of a hyperconverged environment, with NCI Starter, which converges the datacentre stack, including compute, storage and networking.

The pro option combines NCI Pro and Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Starter, both on cores. NCM provides coverage for Nutanix and VMware private clouds.

And finally, the ultra option includes NCI Ultimate and NCM Starter, offering the highest performance and SAN features available.

“Our NCI solution is known for simplifying IT environments with a server-based software-defined model. The new Cloud Bundles extend this to make it easier for our channel network across EMEA to order hybrid cloud infrastructure, multicloud management, unified storage, database and desktop services solutions,” said Tarbox.

“Nutanix is a partner-driven organisation, and we want to equip our extensive channel base with innovative solutions on which they can deliver their own value-added services to ensure their customers are ready to scale in an increasingly cloud-based world,” he added.