Nutanix Reveals Trio of Channel Leadership Promotions

Nutanix has revealed three new EMEA channel leadership appointments.

First, Sven Schoenaerts will be responsible for all of Nutanix’s routes to market.

Nutanix's Sven Schoenaerts

Schoenaerts joined the cloud infrastructure provider as channel sales director for NEEUR (Benelux, Nordics & Baltics, Eastern Europe, CIS) in January 2022. Now all of the company’s EMEA regional channel sales leaderss will report to him.

Additionally, Nutanix has appointed Philippe Dosset to lead its EMEA OEM & alliances team. 

Dosset joined last year as channel director for France, EMEA South and Northwest Africa. Prior to joining Nutanix, he spent 22 years at Dell, holding various executive roles. Most recently he was Dell’s VP of cloud infrastructure sales.

Nutanix's Philippe Dosset

In his new role, Dosset will be responsible for driving new business opportunities through alliances and OEM partnerships.

A Nutanix spokesperson said the channel leadership appointments “are serving its long-term strategy to be successful with its partners."

“Philippe Dosset takes on the EMEA leadership of a newly created organisation bringing together all its OEM and alliances resources and establishing the next foundation for its expanded OEM business," the company said, "while Sven’s appointment is a testimony to the strong bench of leaderships Nutanix can count on and continues to develop, ensuring the unique people and partner culture is maintained.”

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New MSP Leadership

The third appointment is Chris De Vere to EMEA MSP leadership. De Vere will lead Nutanix’s team of MSP sales and business development managers. Some of these are already with the company and will move into Chris’ team; others will be recruited as part of approved headcount investments for Nutanix's 2025 fiscal year.

De Vere recently joined Nutanix from a 13-year spell at rival VMware. Most recently, he was responsible for VMware’s MSP SaaS business across EMEA.

Nutanix's Chris De Vere

The appointment is part of Nutanix’s consolidation of its MSP sales efforts and resources in EMEA following its channel reorganisation. It said the changes will support accelerated development of service provider opportunities with account executives as well as better handling of ecosystem requirements for the MSP channel, such as developing Nutanix’ Service Provider Aggregator ecosystem.

In October 2023, Nutanix relaunched its partner program, Elevate. Nutanix debuted a new approach — channel-led selling. Changes included “a revamped incentive structure and channel-led selling motions that empower partners with deal control throughout the sales cycle.”

With De Vere’s appointment, Schoenaerts said Nutanix is “breaking new ground with this set up.”

“Our longstanding commitment to the partner ecosystem has delivered sustained customer satisfaction and profitable expansion for our partners. We look forward to working with the MSP ecosystem in the same way, and I am thrilled to have Chris on the team to pave the way," said Schoenarts.

Nutanix 'Opportunistic' Around VMware Partners

The channel leadership appointments come as Nutanix looks to capitalize on the uncertainty around Broadcom’s actions following its acquisition of VMware. Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami says the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendor is taking an opportunistic approach to court partners who might be confused about Broadcom’s policies for VMware.

“We certainly have seen a lot more interest from partners wanting to sign up to become Nutanix partners,” the Nutanix CEO said. “Things are starting to become clearer for them. Broadcom is taking the top 2,000 VMware customers direct, so that’s definitely not good for the channel partners who are involved with those customers. From a channel partner perspective, we have reacted to that.”