Nutanix Channel Chief Christian Alvarez Departs

‘Christian was an advocate for the channel, and was really focused on implementing channel-centric programs to help drive growth,’ says Rick Gouin, chief technology officer with Waltham, Mass.-based Winslow Technology Group, a Nutanix Cloud Champion Partner.

Christian Alvarez, Nutanix’s channel chief for the last three years, is departing the company for a role he has not yet disclosed.

“I have decided to move on,” he told CRN. “I’m going to take a little time off. It’s all amicable and good. Nutanix is a great company, with a great product and great technology and continues to be focused partner-first.”

Alvarez’s replacement, Dave Gwyn, senior vice president of global customer success at Nutanix, said in a statement that the company was grateful to him for “building this strong foundation.”

“It’s an honor to take the baton from Christian to lead Nutanix’s worldwide channel organization as we enter this new chapter, driving synergies between the channel and our customer success organization,” Gwyn stated. “Our focus will remain on continuing to find new ways to win alongside our partners and better enabling the delivery of customer value beyond the initial transaction.”

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Rick Gouin, chief technology officer with Waltham, Mass.-based Winslow Technology Group, a Nutanix Cloud Champion Partner, said Alvarez took the success of partners personally. He said the Nutanix channel has been performing well under Alvarez’s leadership.

“Christian was an advocate for the channel, and was really focused on implementing channel-centric programs to help drive growth,” he said. “Christian got involved personally to help Winslow Technology Group with a couple of customer issues that we brought to his attention. We definitely appreciated his assistance.”

Alvarez said he arrived at the San Jose, Calif.-based hyperconverged infrastructure software and rising hybrid cloud player a little more than three years ago with the intent to build a better, more mature partner program that focused on simplicity and profitability. To do so, he said he took Nutanix existing eight or nine partner models and collapsed it to one, regardless of the partner’s size or its route to market.

“By pivoting to a 100-percent competency-based partner program. It’s no longer the biggest or who sells the most,” he said. “We placed value and incentives on the partners who had the most enablement, and training and certification. Simple as that. That drove a huge adoption to certification and training and specialization, like nothing we have seen before.”

Alvarez said the traditional partner program rewarded the biggest partners who brought in the largest deals. However, Alvarez said the company’s net promotor score, and awards from many corners of the channel ecosystem have demonstrated that the new approach worked.

“Our partners have really seen a whole new level of predictability and profitability, which is what they want,” he said. “We’ve taken a lot of pride in introducing simplicity. Between myself and my amazing team of men and women around the world, we accomplished that mission and its something we are all very, very proud of.”

Alavarez was previously worldwide head of channels and distribution at Juniper Networks.