Nutanix Partners See Project Beacon, Other New Offerings As ‘Milestone’

‘A lot of organizations come up with a great idea and they have a hard time coming up with the next great idea. I think this is a 2.0 moment. This is an important milestone for them. Multi-cloud is here to stay,’ says Mark Graham, vice president of partner business development at Trace3.

Nutanix is making a simple promise to partners: We can run every type of workload in every type of environment, and you can too.

Now Nutanix wants a go-to-market army of channel partners to wrap services around this multi-cloud sales motion, incenting them with bonuses for net-new customers and early renewals as they evangelize the virtues of workload freedom and the bliss of application flexibility.

Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami told the crowd at its annual .NEXT conference, the company’s largest event of the year, that this has been part of a multiyear journey.

“We provide you with choice: AWS, [Microsoft] Azure, data centers, cloud-native stacks, pick your Kubernetes stack of choice. We support all of that,” he said. “We make it easy for your customers’ products by giving you a license of your duration of choice that is completely portable. One platform to run apps and manage data.”

[RELATED: Nutanix’s ‘Two Largest Wins’ Came Through Partners As Company Posts Strong First Quarter]

The San Jose, Calif.-based company is focusing on giving customers the ability to pick up and move workloads, applications—and the compute and storage that support those applications—with a single click.

It is called Project Beacon.

“With Project Beacon, we are making this easy,” Ramaswami said. “Helping you to build an app once, with a consistent set of data services available anywhere, so you can build an app once and it’s a fully portable app that you can now deploy anywhere.”

Ramaswami said the new technology helps overloaded database managers, the developers who are slowed down because they need access to the database, as well as those looking to move away from proprietary databases to open-source databases.

Nutanix supports five popular databases: Postgres, MongoDB, MySQL, Oracle Database and Microsoft SQL Server. On stage Nutanix demonstrated using the technology to move a database from AWS to Azure with a single click.

Ramaswami said this will give partners the ability to break down silos that now block customers from optimizing for cost and performance by choosing where to place workloads and applications.

“Every cloud is a silo. Your on-prem is different from your edge, is different from Public Cloud A, Public Cloud B and Public Cloud C,” Ramaswami told the crowd. “We offer freedom of choice and flexibility at every layer of the stack.”

Nutanix Central Debut

Another new offering, Nutanix Central, is an orchestration layer that provides visibility and control across all of a customer’s environment. This is a critical function, said Ramaswami, considering that 74 percent of respondents to a Nutanix survey said they planned to use multiple forms of infrastructure over the next two to three years.

“Wouldn’t you love to have centralized visibility and reporting across all your deployments? Wouldn’t you like to have a single console to manage this? And wouldn’t you like to have seamless access to our cloud services?” Ramaswami said. “It can help you manage your distributed environments at scale.”

Nutanix Central stood out for Winslow Technology Group COO Ed Palmer.

“The functionally in Nutanix Central, including comprehensive management and reporting across multiple clouds and on-premises infrastructure, will benefit Winslow Technology Group’s Nutanix customers that are looking for centralized visibility and control,” he said.

Palmer said Winslow Technology Group has regular conversations with customers about multi-cloud strategies, and these new capabilities give his customers another reason to invest more in Nutanix.

“Our customers are increasingly looking to Winslow Technology Group and our expertise to help them move their workloads and applications from one cloud to another and bi-directionally between on-prem and public clouds,” he said. “This capability provides flexibility for the customer and partner relative to where the workloads and data can reside.

Mark Graham, vice president of partner business development at Trace3, called the the array of new offerings a “milestone” for Nutanix.

“A lot of organizations come up with a great idea and they have a hard time coming up with the next great idea. I think this is a 2.0 moment. This is an important milestone for them,” he told CRN. “Multi-cloud is here to stay.”

Trace3, an Irvine, Calif. based solution provider, is tied for No. 36 in CRN’s 2022 Solution Provider 500 list, with annual revenue of about $2.3 billion. Graham said the new offerings show Nutanix is leading the discussion with their customers and prospects around multi-cloud and infrastructure needs.

“It’s going to make the adoption of Nutanix that much better,” Graham said. “It just further solidifies a customer’s decision that they don’t have to be afraid of too much complexity because they are here to make it simple for me.”

Multi-Cloud Snapshots

Another offering, Multi-Cloud Snapshot Technology, extends Nutanix capabilities to cloud-native object stores, starting with AWS S3 and moving to others, Ramaswami said.

“There are so many use cases for this,” he said. “Now that you can create a snapshot, you can instantly recover the snapshot anywhere.”

Ramaswami said as the work becomes more complex for solution providers, it is incumbent on Nutanix to offer simplicity.

“Today you operate in this multi-cloud world, but that world is siloed. It’s too complicated. It’s too expensive,” he said. “This is not new to us. We have broken silos before. We started back in the day, breaking silos between compute, storage, network and data centers. We took all of them and brought them together into a single hyperconverged platform and made it much simpler for you to operate with a lot fewer staff.”