Juniper Networks Vet Promoted to Lead Nutanix Channel Partner Program

Hired last year to run Nutanix’s Americas channel sales, Christian Alvarez will now lead the global Nutanix channel partner program.

Alvarez came to Nutanix from Juniper Networks, where he was worldwide head of channels and distribution. He worked for Juniper for four years.

As the new senior vice president of worldwide channels, Alvarez is in charge of the company’s channel community and strategy. That includes developing global sales and distribution programs for VARs, distributors, OEMs, global system integrators, telco partners and others.

Nutanix’s Christian Alvarez

Alvarez said he wants to lead Nutanix’s worldwide partner organization through its next phase of growth.

Alvarez joined Nutanix in September as vice president of channel sales for the Americas. Just five months later, the company named him interim head of worldwide partner sales. As the COVID-19 pandemic struck, he has helped partners and customers react to help their redistributed work-from-home users. He also led the development of a special financing program to help partners alleviate cash flow concerns during the crisis.

Chris Kaddaras is Nutanix’s executive vice president of worldwide sales. He’s all-in on Alvarez.

“Christian is an innovator and a strategic thinker, spearheading new offerings and contributing to collaboration across the organization,” said Kaddaras. “Christian is ideally suited to execute on our global mission to help both our partners and customers adapt to and enable virtual work.”

Until Nutanix hires a new Americas regional channel sales leader, Alvarez will continue to lead that effort as well.

Nutanix endured some growing pains in 2019. A year ago, the company saw its global channel chief leave after only 15 months on the job. In addition, its chief revenue officer also left after lower than expected revenue guidance was reported. Those developments came nine months after the company’s president departed to head a big data vendor.

Nutanix HCI Gets Platform Upgrades

Nutanix on Wednesday also announced several enhancements to its hyperconverged infrastructure platform, including built-in multisite disaster recovery tools. Also included is advanced automation for recovering applications and data, as well as support for synchronous replication for AHV workloads. And it also supports near-zero data loss with near sync replication for recovery point objective (RPO) times of 20 seconds.

The Nutanix platform’s ability to support multisite DR allows enterprises to recover faster from simultaneous data center failures. The synchronous replication of data between multiple locations now is natively supported on the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. AHV works with a wide range of critical workloads, including virtual desktop infrastructure, databases and general server virtualization.

Nutanix’s Greg Smith

The new built-in disaster recovery capabilities make things easier for partners and customers. So says Greg Smith, product marketing VP at Nutanix, told Channel Futures.

“Business continuity is now more important than ever and, with this release, Nutanix partners will be able to deliver a native, comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery solutions to their customers,” Smith told Channel Futures. “Before, customers looking to implement strong disaster recovery plans for critical applications had to deploy complex, often disparate technologies that demanded specialized, ongoing administration. Now, with the new capabilities in Nutanix HCI, AHV customers can deliver disaster recovery applications with significantly less complexity and without real-time management.”

Naveen Chhabra, analyst with Forrester Research, said the updates will allow a Nutanix channel partner to solve customer needs more easily.

“They can new confidently sell a single packaged solution,” said Chhabra. “Up until now, if a client needed data replication, they would have to rely on other companies. Now partners can sell one solution from one vendor.”

That is helpful for managed services providers (MSPs), particularly those who standardize on the Nutanix platform, he said.

“This makes a lot of sense. There will be fewer integration needs. And integrations break, and then things don’t work,” said Chhabra. “This simplifies that and removes those potential problems.”