Nutanix Partner Program Sees More Changes, Vendor Touts ‘Channel-Led’
We quizzed channel head Dave Gwyn about the additions, and the language around Elevate.
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What Nutanix says: Larger Payout for New Business Individual Incentive: Now partner sellers and sales engineers (SEs) can earn a 2% incentive, up to $7,500 per deal, for identifying, registering and winning new business with Nutanix. This incentive program complements our New Business Rebate for partner reseller organizations, which maintains its lucrative structure from FY23.
What we asked: How is Nutanix defining “partner sellers”? Does “partner seller” differ from “partner”? If not, what is the value of a 2% incentive for a partner who earns far more on a deal? (Note: Nutanix launched the New Business Individual Incentive in 2022. We wanted to understand more about the additional take here and make sure we weren’t missing something important.)
Gwyn’s response: Partner sellers are defined as both the sales engineer and individual sales representatives (i.e. AEs, account managers, etc.) who are the primary drivers of the deal from the partner. This 2% incentive is directed at the seller itself (i.e. a SPIFF) — and is in addition to the lucrative New Business Acquisition incentive for partner organizations. We’re excited about this as it drives alignment by incentivizing both individuals and organizations as they capture new customers for Nutanix. … Partner sales engineers have been vital to the success Nutanix has seen in the channel since our inception, as some of our strongest partner advocates come from the sales engineering community. We know they serve a critical role working with the sales teams to take deals through the funnel; thus, we wanted to make sure we reward them for their efforts. We recognize that both reps and sales engineers are critical to driving a deal, and thus we think it’s right to incentivize both equally.
What Nutanix says: Increased Discount Advantage for Deal Registration: FY24 brings an enhanced discount advantage to partners who register deals and quote Nutanix simplified product portfolio SKUs (PnP 2.0), as you’ll now see over a 40% greater discount advantage versus non-registered discounting. Registering deals not only provides you with deal protection but can drive even greater profitability for each deal.
What we asked: Deal registration is very common in the channel. Were partners not registering Nutanix deals, such that there had to be a new incentive to get them to do so, or are we overlooking something?
Gwyn’s response: Partners have always registered deals with Nutanix as a part of the sales process. What we’ve done in FY24 is enhance the value of deal registration by offering 40% greater price advantage versus non-registered deals, to create more room for partner margin, and thus incentive to introduce Nutanix into more accounts.
What Nutanix says: Performance Bonuses: Top-performing partners will have the opportunity to earn even more through the Outperformance Rebate program.
What we asked: What performance metrics do partners have to attain to earn performance bonuses, and why?
Gwyn’s response: Nutanix sets its own year-over-year bookings growth targets, and in order to hit those targets, has to outperform the prior fiscal year’s bookings. Our Outperformance Incentive is intended to reward partners whose bookings grow in a manner similar to our targeted growth rate. On a quarterly cadence, healthy rebates are paid to partners who outperform their bookings for the same quarter in the prior year. Higher outperformance drives higher rebate percentages.
What Nutanix says: Channel-Led Selling Motion Brings Empowerment for Full Lifecycle Ownership. At Nutanix, we’re focused on placing our valued partner ecosystem into the driver’s seat of the sales cycle. Channel-Led selling provides Nutanix partners deal control throughout the sales cycle for customers and prospects in select accounts. This gives partners the ability to drive deals their way, fostering more intimate customer relationships by showcasing their full Nutanix capabilities and value-added services to deliver customer success. To achieve this, we’ll be backing partners with new levels of sales support and resources to guide partners toward selling success …
What we asked: There’s a recent trend among vendors, where more are emphasizing “channel-led” sales. This basically calls attention to a gap that they’re finally filling, to be frank. Why is Nutanix emphasizing “channel-led” now, especially when partner execs have, over the past four years, already made that assertion? As a follow-on point, what’s been missing that this approach intends to resolve?
Gwyn’s response: The biggest change in “channel-led” at Nutanix for FY24 is that internally we’re embracing a cultural shift that forces us to allow partners to take the lead role in sales cycles on specific accounts. To that end, a very sizable portion of our addressable-market account base now falls into a newly created segment in which partners own all aspects of the sales cycle, with sales support and enablement from a newly created global organization at Nutanix, chartered specifically to ensure partner success in this segment.
We’ve made progress toward partner autonomy in prior years, which has led us to this point where we’re able to create and support a distinct segment. Prior years’ progress (about which you heard from previous partner execs) included important steps in pricing and development of systems, tools and processes to automate and simplify channel-led sales motions.
What Nutanix says: [Bullet point from the Nutanix blog] Dedicated Channel-Led sales resource centers across the world, purpose-built to support partners on deals with select accounts when needed in any facet of the sales cycle.
What we asked: What are these “resource centers” and what will they do? Also, where are they?
Gwyn’s response: We announced new global, dedicated channel-led sales resource centers, purpose-built to support and enable partners on deals with select accounts when needed in any facet of the sales cycle. The resource centers include:
• Sales resource pods consisting of sales and sales engineers who are 100% dedicated to supporting partners. These dedicated teams in Americas, EMEA and APJ directly support and enable partners in finding and progressing deals, assisting with any aspect of the sales cycle (prospecting, presenting, sizing, quoting, etc.), as well as enabling partners as we bring new products or product updates to market.
• Extended tooling with advanced features that were previously only available to our own SEs (for example, Sizer which provides workload capacity planning) along with a dedicated help desk for partners to reach out when in the process of driving a deal.
The above provide an added level of resourcing for partners in this segment in addition to the support they receive today.
What Nutanix says: [Bullet point from the Nutanix blog] Robust new enablement pathways launching mid-October in the updated Nutanix University platform to ensure partners have the sales, technical and services capabilities needed to be successful around hybrid multicloud solutions.
What we asked: What kinds of “enablement pathways” is Nutanix implementing? Shouldn’t these have already been available considering the company’s talk track around hybrid multicloud?
Gwyn’s response: Our approach to enablement is continuously evolving to adapt with the market and best support our partners. As hybrid multicloud continued to move the forefront of IT, we added even more structured, practical, role-based pathways to mastery of the Nutanix Cloud Platform and hybrid multicloud more broadly.
The enablement pathways are categorized by learning levels, from Associate to Professional, then Master and, finally, Expert. This tiered structure not only empowers our partners to choose the depth and breadth of their expertise but also showcases our commitment to continuous partner development. We believe this sets us apart from many of our competitors who often offer one-size-fits-all enablement programs. We recently rolled out this same approach to our internal teams and have seen great results to date.
What Nutanix says: [H]elping our partners deliver customer success throughout the life cycle is paramount to achieving business growth and satisfied users. That’s why Nutanix is taking proactive steps to empower partners with increased visibility into Annual Team Renewals data in our new fiscal year. By offering partners a comprehensive view of renewal data, Nutanix will enable our partners to proactively address issues, to ensure their customers are not only satisfied, but also thriving.
What we asked: A lot of vendors have delivered renewals insights to partners for years. Why is Nutanix only now starting to do this?
Gwyn’s response: Some vendors have done this, but this is not yet a standard in this industry as many companies are just now moving to a subscription model. We’re differentiating by not only providing the actual line-item data to our partners around renewals, but advanced analytics that show the areas and accounts where they’re driving customer success today. We’re also providing analytics around future renewals with recommendations on how to engage in proactive conversations today to keep our customers satisfied.
What Nutanix says: Starting now, Nutanix also delivers the ability to leverage cloud marketplaces as a new route to market, including integrations with both the Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services marketplaces. Most importantly, partners receive the same discount advantages as they would through traditional transaction avenues. Partners can now take advantage of seamless transactions and reduced sales cycles with their customers using programs such as the AWS Channel-Partner-Private Offer and Azure Multiparty Private Offers where available.
What we asked: What kind of training or guidance will Nutanix offer to partners who want to take advantage of the company’s solutions through the AWS or Azure marketplace?
Gwyn’s response: Cloud marketplaces are relatively straightforward when it comes to transacting. Where we’re leading in this space is ensuring that no partner is left behind when customers transact through these marketplaces. Many vendors use cloud marketplaces to take business direct without partners, but through the work we’ve done with Microsoft to take advantage of Azure Multiparty Private Offers and AWS with Channel Partner Private Offers, we’re bringing partners along with us, allowing them to capture the value of their efforts in winning deals.
What we asked: What haven’t I asked that you would like to add?
Gwyn’s response: FY24 is presenting one of the most exciting marketplaces Nutanix has seen in many years. M&A of a major enterprise virtualization vendor has an astounding number of companies pondering their future plans for all things virtual and container. Some wish to hedge their on-prem (private cloud) deployments by considering new virtualization and Kubernetes platforms that aren’t wed to a single hypervisor. Others wish to hedge by considering migration to public clouds as cost effectively as possible.
Both of these alternatives being considered by companies are strengths for Nutanix, and thus represent an opportunity for Nutanix partners to consult with and bring value to their customers pondering these market changes. These new incentives and resources are intended to help our partners with more opportunities to grow their businesses, elevate their skills and maximize earnings in the year ahead.
What we asked: What haven’t I asked that you would like to add?
Gwyn’s response: FY24 is presenting one of the most exciting marketplaces Nutanix has seen in many years. M&A of a major enterprise virtualization vendor has an astounding number of companies pondering their future plans for all things virtual and container. Some wish to hedge their on-prem (private cloud) deployments by considering new virtualization and Kubernetes platforms that aren’t wed to a single hypervisor. Others wish to hedge by considering migration to public clouds as cost effectively as possible.
Both of these alternatives being considered by companies are strengths for Nutanix, and thus represent an opportunity for Nutanix partners to consult with and bring value to their customers pondering these market changes. These new incentives and resources are intended to help our partners with more opportunities to grow their businesses, elevate their skills and maximize earnings in the year ahead.
The next iteration of the Nutanix partner program has arrived.
As Nutanix continues its shift from selling physical appliances to offering only software (on a licensed subscription basis), the company keeps changing Elevate to align more with the cloud computing era. As such, the latest version of the Nutanix partner program landed in late September — perhaps, not coincidentally, a couple days after the vendor delivered positive growth projections to Wall Street. (Also not coincidentally? As end users raise eyebrows around the pending acquisition of VMware, a Nutanix rival, by Broadcom.)
Those forecasts are critical for Nutanix and its partners. During last year’s final quarter, rumors started abounding that Hewlett Packard Enterprise would buy the struggling company. Nutanix had recently enacted another round of layoffs (4% of its workforce, or 270 people) amid unfavorable financial results. A couple months prior to those job cuts, channel chief Christian Alvarez left the company, and longtime company insider Dave Gwyn took over the role. Alvarez departed two months after spearheading the rollout of new incentives. Then, Nutanix last December debuted a referral program, but that was the last major update the Nutanix partner program received.
Until now.
The company, intent on its mission of deploying hyperconverged infrastructure – much like VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Dell VxRail and other providers do, too – has revamped Elevate, the Nutanix partner program. The changes come, Nutanix says, as organizations pursue digital transformation, data-driven insights, AI and the cloud. (They also are timed to coincide with the start of Nutanix’s 2024 fiscal year.)
But translating buzzwords into revenue poses the real challenge. Nutanix hopes to do that with its new approach — channel-led selling.
Perhaps this change comes as a reaction to industry projections. Research firm Canalys (an Informa company), for instance, predicts that, this year alone, partners will drive more than 70% of IT spending.
Nutanix Partner Program: More to the Story?
But perhaps there’s more to the story as well. Of late, more vendors seem to be emphasizing their dedication to a “partner-first” model (drawing ire from peers). This raises questions about their true commitment to the channel, especially at a volatile economic time when, to assuage antsy investors, companies can – and do – pivot strategies in a hot second. This can leave partners in the dust (something that has happened in various sectors of the channel many times over the years).
Nutanix’s Dave Gwyn
The new Nutanix partner program now contains language that prompts that kind of exploration. According to the company’s Sept. 28 blog announcing additions to Elevate, changes include “a revamped incentive structure and channel-led selling motions that empower partners with deal control throughout the sales cycle.” That includes a new rebate incentive paid for winning deals with “select accounts” (per Nutanix).
Given that Nutanix has switched up its channel specifics several times over the past four years, we sat down with Gwyn, senior vice president of worldwide channels and customer success, to get more information.
See the slideshow above to learn more about the updated Nutanix partner program, straight from Gwyn.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Kelly Teal or connect with her on LinkedIn. |
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