Nutanix appoints Shree Balachandran as first ANZ cloud economist

Cloud computing software company Nutanix has appointed Shree Balachandran to the newly created position of Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) cloud economist.

Melbourne-based Balachandran joins Nutanix with over 25 years of strategy, sales and operations experience, having served in leadership positions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Oracle.

He will collaborate with the local Nutanix leadership and sales team, as well as the partner community, to help organisations achieve greater value in their cloud environments.

Balachandran said that cloud economics is a priority as companies move away from 'all-in' strategies and as cloud costs, including ingress and egress (transferring data in and out of an environment), continue to soar.

“Many companies in Australia and New Zealand that said a few years ago, ‘we’re putting it all in public cloud’, hit a crossroads at about 15 per cent of their data, where going any further is either impossible or prohibitively expensive,” he said.

"This has crystalised the idea of hybrid multicloud strategies as the way forward, but many are still unsure of how to get there, what data and applications should sit where and for how long, and where they should focus their investments."

"Nutanix is building the blueprint for how they can do this and I’m looking forward to helping the company educate the market and execute on its vision."

Nutanix said Balachandran's appointment comes at a time when Australian companies are projected to spend $19.9 billion and New Zealand companies $3 billion on cloud services this year alone.

It also follows Microsoft, which partners with Nutanix on its Clusters (NC2) hybrid cloud platform, announcing it would invest $5 billion to expand its hyperscale cloud and AI infrastructure in Australia.

"There's no one-size-fits-all, but if your environment has too much legacy on-premises infrastructure, you're losing out," Balachandran said.

"If you have too much public cloud and no system in place to make your data interoperable between different clouds, you're losing out.

"Without applying an economic lens to cloud spend, costs will soar – particularly as data grows and intensive applications like AI take hold."

Cloud economics to drive IT sustainability

Balachandran said that sustainability is starting to become a major factor in IT decisions as organisations respond to federal government initiatives such as Australian’s Net Zero Authority and New Zealand's guidelines encouraging sustainability in cloud procurement.

“We’ve seen in other regions that when legislation and guidelines come in, organisations start asking different questions when they buy ICT services,” he said.

"That’s starting to happen now in ANZ and it’s evident in the conversations Nutanix is having with end users and partners."

“As IT budgets remain under pressure, we need to find ways to be more sustainable by maintaining – or ideally lowering – costs, and cloud economics is an ideal discipline to achieve that.”

With Balachandran joining a team of Nutanix cloud economists worldwide, Nutanix is placing a significant emphasis on improving customers' cloud value on their balance sheets.

“Shree brings a wealth of experience and will be an invaluable financial resource for our customers and partners,” Nutanix ANZ managing director Damien McDade said.

“This role speaks to the core of concerns ANZ CIOs, CFOs and others have as they seek to get to the next stages of business transformation while making good on the sizable investments they’ve already made in cloud computing."

"We know Nutanix is vital to that equation and our focus on, and investment in, cloud economics is testament to that.”