Nutanix to tweak partner program again in November

Nutanix will tweak its partner program in November, CRN has learned.

The hyperconverged infrastructure vendor announced a new channel structure and program in August 2018. The new plan did away with the revenue-based tiers and replaced them with a “channel charter” that defined “Pioneer”, “Scaler” and “Master” tiers that partners could earn based on the products and services they sold.

Pioneers sell mostly vanilla Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure, Scalers add some of the company’s newer products while Masters sell more sophisticated solutions still and will likely operate a dedicated Nutanix services program.

The company’s senior director of channels for Asia-Pacific and Japan Jacob Pereira this week told CRN that the charter would be updated at the company’s .NEXT conference to be held in London from 27 November. While Pereira did not suggest the changes would be major, he did say the charter would evolve to versions 2.0 and 3.0 over time.

Any changes will alter what partners need to sell to achieve each tier, to reflect Nutanix’s expanding portfolio.

The company is currently bullish about Beam, the tool that offers insights into the most cost-effective place to run workloads across private and public clouds. Calm, an automation tool, is also something Pereira hopes the channel will adopt.

The company is also preparing more solution templates for the channel, for applications such as desktop and database-as-a-service.

One thing Australian Nutanix partners currently can’t grasp is the company’s Xi cloud services, which are operated by Nutanix and available for resellers to offer their clients. Xi currently operates in the USA only, but Pereira and Nutanix Australia channel director Andrew Diamond both said an Asia-Pacific version of the service was on the company’s roadmap, but could offer no further detail.