What is the goal of your new distributor programme? How will it benefit distributors in the future?
We’re focusing on creating profit and development routes for all of our partners, regardless of solution areas or company size, so they can expand their service programs and accelerate their offerings. We’re focusing on making it even simpler to conduct business with us by simplifying and automating our procedures to allow partners to transact more quickly.
Our new Elevate Distributor program will help partners better discover distributors with the skill sets and competencies they need to accelerate and develop their companies. The program offers advantages and tools to help Distributors improve their operational efficiency, sales momentum and profitability.
This means that partners may utilise the Nutanix partner site to find reputable Nutanix distributors with the necessary expertise, resources, and operational capabilities to help them achieve new levels of success.
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“Our new Elevate Distributor program will help partners better discover distributors with the skill sets and competencies they need to accelerate and develop their companies.”
Ritesh Syal,
Head & Director, Channels & Alliances,
India, Nutanix
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The Elevate program level of a distributor will assist partners in identifying the right distributor to work with, one that has competencies to support their own sales and technical teams, as well as digital distribution capabilities to ensure transactions are completed as quickly and frictionlessly as possible.
As one year has passed since the launch of your partner programme – Elevate, can you elaborate how it has supported partners till date?
Elevate is designed for simplicity and is a result of a lot of discussion with partners across the world. We were able to understand the nuances of their operations, where their pain points are, and what they need to really become more customer-centric and increase profitability. We have also launched specific programs for Distributors and Service Providers (the Nutanix Elevate Service Providers Program), and launched our Partner Support Center in Bangalore, as a response to their unique needs. Because it has been such a collaborative effort, the results have been very positive so far. Due to the PSCs, we have seen a rise in the number of transacting partners quarter on quarter, as well as greater upskilling within our partner ecosystem.
With Elevate, our partners are witnessing reduction in management expenses, and greater simplicity in engagement. With one-click deployment, updates, scaling, self-healing capabilities, and troubleshooting, in some cases our partners are able to deliver IT services 80 up to percent faster. Overall, this is helping partners with efficiency in managing IT infrastructure, freeing up significant time to focus on innovation and supporting larger business goals.
Elevate has successfully helped us and our partners move away from a traditional tiered program structure to a 100% competency-based program.
What is driving the shift to subscription-models, and how should partners align themselves to this trend?
The appetite for traditional, large, capitalised IT investments is rapidly being replaced by flexible licences since organisations do not want to be locked-in with ownership. Longer-term vendor relationships are no longer approached in the same way they formerly were. A subscription model allows an organization to focus on business outcomes rather than upkeep and maintenance which is not only costly, it can slow down their business. When organizations don’t have to spend time and resources handling “things,” they are freed up to focus on customer service.
We’ve successfully transitioned to a subscription-based business, and our partners remain at the center of this transition- from adopting subscription-based consumption themselves, to understanding how it works for their customers. Our Elevate program is helping partners with this because it truly emphasizes expertise and capability over size, and pays on a recurring-revenue basis, meaning that thanks to our subscription model partners aren’t just rewarded during the initial sale but throughout the customer’s engagement with Nutanix.
What stage of hybrid and multicloud adoption do you think India customers are at? What is your expectation for the future of India’s enterprises in terms of technology adoption?
Going by our latest Enterprise Cloud Index findings, majority of enterprises in India ramped up their investment into hybrid multicloud due to the pandemic. Enterprises are still in the early stages of digital transformation, despite the fact that digital adoption accelerated at the start of the pandemic to support remote work. As companies continue to go digital, they are modernizing their infrastructure and creating modern applications, essentially using cloud as an operating model. In order to do this, simplicity becomes key which is why our customers prefer hybrid multicloud. They have realised it helps them balance agility, costs, performance, and regulatory elements of their IT operations while avoiding the problems of a one-size-fits-all cloud approach. With this in mind, we expect that India will continue to be a big contributor to our projected 25% growth in annual contract value over the next four years.
For India’s businesses, the subscription model, intelligent edge computing, and cloud-based automation hold a lot of potential in terms of enhancing customer experience and business agility. The buyer’s journey will continue to develop in today’s subscription and consumption-based economy, and EaaS will allow organisations to consume software and technology as needed. Customers will demand hyper-personalized experiences via digital platforms and services at a quicker pace more than ever, therefore edge computing, analytics and automation will be a big differentiator for businesses.
