Nutanix expands Elevate partner programme to include systems integrators

Nutanix has announced the largest expansion of its Elevate Partner Program to date, bringing systems integrators into the scheme for the first time and adding new revenue streams across referrals, renewals and partner-led services.

The FY27 updates restructure Elevate around seven earning motions - Land, Expand, Grow, Reward, Retain, Refer and Differentiate - giving eligible partners opportunities to generate revenue beyond the initial technology sale.

New incentives cover net-new customer transactions, year-over-year growth, on-time renewals and customer expansion into areas including enterprise AI, cloud-native applications and databases.

Nutanix said SIs play a growing role in shaping IT strategy, managing migrations and delivering services, and eligible SIs will now be able to earn referral rewards for identifying and developing opportunities even when they are not the partner of record on the final sale.

Additional incentives are attached to deals involving Nutanix Enterprise AI, Nutanix Database Service (NDB) and Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP), alongside services built around those technologies.

Nutanix is also expanding its Powered by Nutanix: Verified Services track, through which eligible partners can build recognised delivery capabilities in migrations, deployment and ongoing customer support. The company said partners will gain access to standardised Service Delivery Kits and shadowing opportunities with Nutanix experts to develop their professional services businesses.

On the platform side, Nutanix said support for selected external-storage configurations - including applicable Dell, Everpure and NetApp technologies - gives partners more options to modernise customer environments while retaining existing infrastructure.

Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) enables partners to help customers move supported workloads between on-premises environments and supported public clouds, which the company said can be useful when hardware availability or capacity is a constraint.

Nutanix is also developing AI-powered tools for partner engagement. Deal Coach, planned for introduction through Nutanix Partner Central later this fiscal year, is designed to support sales-cycle activities.

Further planned capabilities include visibility into selected customer-environment health, adoption and lifecycle signals, subject to customer authorisation, to help partners plan renewals.