Nutanix Revamps Rebates, Launches Drive For Partner Autonomy

‘We looked at the whole program. Not just program as far as rebates and incentives, but also front-end stuff. So we’ve revamped how they make margin, better margin, better price advantage for deal reg partners. We’ve got a lot of improvements to the rebates,’ says Nutanix Channel Chief David Gwyn.

Nutanix is rolling out new incentives to lead channel-selling motions, which give partners control throughout the deal cycle and individual sellers the opportunity to make more money, the hyperconverged infrastructure leader’s channel chief told CRN.

“So we really revamped everything that makes partners happy. We looked at the whole program. Not just the program as far as rebates and incentives, but also front-end stuff,” said David Gwyn, Nutanix’s channel chief. “So we’ve revamped how they make margin, better margin, better price advantage for deal reg partners. We’ve got a lot of improvements to the rebates.”

The new business rebates, he said, are more lucrative for the partner’s organization as well as for the individual seller who closes a Nutanix deal.

[RELATED: Nutanix’ Cisco Alliance Provides ‘Massive’ Partner Opportunity, Channel Exec Goffi Says]

“Our thinking is lets deconflict that,” he said. “You don’t want to have the rep wanting to sell us, but the company doesn’t care. Or the company wanting to sell us but the rep doesn’t care.”

Additionally, he said sellers will make more rebate for out-performance in sales as well.

“As soon as you begin to outperform, you’re going to start making rebates, and then there’s three increments of outperformance,” he said. “So as soon as you get to the third tier of outperformance then, you’re making really big rebates.”

The Nutanix partner advisory board had also recommended, returning money to their businesses more frequently through incentives.

“And so we shifted it to be in a quarterly rebate,” he said. “So we’re looking at your outperformance on a year over year basis, but based on that prior year’s same quarter. How did you do last year. Did you out perform this year? Here’s your reading.”

He said the shorter time frames give partners a greater ability to align sales for higher levels of incentives.

“That makes it a lot safer to build a program around if you are a channel leader,” he said.

On the channel led-side he said the company is applying a cultural shift, towards providing partners with greater autonomy.

“There’s good times to be in deals and there’s times you want them to be involved in it on their own,” he said.

He said there is a safety net under those deals for the partner called CLARC, which stands for Channel Led Autonomous Resource Center. He said those teams are there to support and enable Nutanix channel partners.

“If a partner calls and says, ‘I’m not good at this particular facet of the sales cycle,’ “ he said. “CLARC is trained in all facets so we can help a partner now and put them in enablement to make them better next time.”

Gwyn said it comes down to enabling partner autonomy and meeting partners and their business needs.

“CLARC is about being able to slowly break that dependency where we support you,” he said.

Meanwhile, Nutanix unveiled a global strategic partnership with Cisco Systems, which Nutanix North American channel chief Christian Goffi told CRN was a massive opportunity for channel partners to expand to a completely new set of customers using the hyper-converged platform they are already experts in architecting.

“The inbound from our partners was immediate, with people saying, ‘I can’t wait to hear more.’ The excitement was through the roof,” he said. “This allows us to think about an entirely new avenue of customers that we don’t have reach to. It’s funny, it was our partner community that immediately saw the excitement. We didn’t have to say anything to them.”

Cisco Systems announced the partnership with Nutanix at the end of August through which the worldwide leader in networking, with 100,000 customers worldwide, will sell Nutanix hyperconverged systems. That was followed by last week’s news that Cisco has issued end-of-life and end-of-sales dates for its Hyperflex hyperconverged system portfolio.