COVID 19: How Is Nutanix Helping The Industry?

Nutanix is leveraging its expertise to help enterprises maintain business continuity during the COVID-19 outbreak. What do their plans sound like and how is the industry benefitting from it? Balakrishnan Anantharaman, Vice President and Managing Director-Sales, India and SAARC, Nutanix spills the beans.

How is Nutanix helping the industry during the COVID-19 outbreak? 

 Nutanix has a full portfolio of proven cloud solutions for customers of any size, type, or industry no matter what stage of their transformation journey. We have consistently provided India’s businesses with a broad range of solutions tailored to their specific business requirements. Since Covid-19, we have ramped up our support mechanisms to increase access and availability to these solutions, for the country’s businesses.

At the start of the outbreak, we immediately extended support to India’s and Asia’s business with an unlimited user, free offer of Xi Frame, our Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution. As Xi Frame is cloud-based, virtual workspaces for individuals, teams, customers, and partners were able to be up and running within an hour. We then increased access to and availability of Xi Frame with 5 new “cloud regions” in Asia Pacific and Japan- making the service more accessible and available to meet the growing demand.

Given the requirement for many enterprises to do more for less, efficiency and productivity is a key concern. As such Nutanix is helping with our Beam Solution (including a free 2 week offer), which optimizes public cloud spend and supports compliance adherence requirements.  This helps enterprises maximize revenue and cash flow. 

And recently, we have added support to our channel partners. The channel ecosystem is a critical lifeline for the country’s enterprises as they look to rebound from the impact of COVID-19 so we have extended payment terms in order to ensure they can focus on getting India’s businesses back up and running without being distracted

What support is Nutanix offering its partners at this time? 

Our commitment to our partners has never been stronger. Enterprises are currently going through a difficult period of adjustment, in trying to adapt to this new business reality. Enterprises have had to fast-track and drastically scale up their digital transformation efforts, particularly since the work-from-home mandate, and this momentum is sure to continue. The IT Channel is key to helping enterprises survive and succeed at this time.

Nutanix will continue to ensure our partners have the right resources to survive and thrive during and post the pandemic. Our priorities at this time for our Partners are- making their lives easier, helping them focus on customers, helping them adapt to the current scenario, and building more strategic alliances. We’re doing this by:

• Making life easier for partners: New solutions, offers and incentives like FastTrack for VDI  and Xi Frame Test Drive
  We’re extending support to partners via Xi Frame and FastTrack for VDI, which helps them get their workspaces up and running within an hour. This quick turnaround time for our partners means they have to worry less about their own operations, and can focus on delivering support to customers.
• Helping partners improve focus
  As we have software platforms for unstructured data, long term archival solutions, cloud spend optimization, compliance, and security of VM’s, it becomes easier for partners to upsell software into their installed base and add value by solving business outcomes for our existing customers. They are not dependent on hardware delivery. 
• Helping partners adapt: Free Certification Exams
  We are investing in the learning and development of our partners by offering free certification exams for solution providers through July 31, 2020. We will continue to offer no-cost courses and resources.
  
• Continuing to build strategic alliances
  Global System Integrators remain important to us, and so does providing our customers with innovative solutions through collaboration with partners. We have recently announced a global partnership with Wipro, as we seek to maximise the benefits of both companies for customers.

We see the IT Channel as our strategic partners. The Nutanix channel initiatives aim to put the customer first, so that we can succeed together with our channel partners. We will continue to evaluate the needs of our community to ensure our partners and customers have the resources they need to be successful in the current scenario.

How will businesses change / what will they do differently as a result of this pandemic? And, how will Nutanix continue to support them?

This pandemic has brought about a new business reality. The businesses that survive will emerge from this turmoil leaner, more efficient, more productive, and far more adaptable – reliant on software, cloud and automation to help them deliver more with less. With their workforce distributed remotely, India’s enterprises are looking to cloud technology to help them operate in these unpredictable times. Until now, Work-from-Anywhere was a ‘nice to have’ and not a ‘need to have’. That has changed and COVID-19 has driven it mainstream in a matter of weeks.

 So, digital transformation that once may have taken years is now rapidly accelerating across every city and every sector. The traditional way of thinking and doing business has been disrupted and the technological, organizational and cultural obstacles have been overcome. As a result, many companies are now embracing software and multi-cloud systems as they provide more flexibility, safety, security and access without the inflexibility and limitations of traditional IT Infrastructure. Business survival is the new normal and has replaced business continuity for India’s enterprises.

What customers want and value, as well as what and how we deliver it has fundamentally changed. Nutanix and our channel partners are ready to help match and adapt to this new reality. This includes:

• Giving India’s businesses a way to do more with less: Increased efficiency with the support of, and access to, cloud and other interoperable software solutions, and a renewed focus on business survivability.
• Supporting the Opex to Capex shift: There is a race to revive revenue, and a higher demand for advanced analytics. Enterprises are embedding efficiencies and productivity gains during the pandemic to ensure their focus is on revenue not growth. The Nutanix subscription model, and solutions like Infrastructure as a Service, will help India’s businesses with this.

As enterprises look to survive and grow, and as they look to increase productivity and efficiency despite a decentralized workforce and changing business models, Nutanix will continue to support them with the latest software-driven technologies. As a modern, flat, and cloud based, software company Nutanix ix already structured to navigate and operate (globally) during the pandemic. This tech based, de-centralised structure has allowed us to focus more on our customers – using our tech to help our customers and partners stay safe, secure, productive and efficient.

What are the other offerings of Nutanix that contribute to building agile enterprises?
 Nutanix has two main streams: preparing enterprises to get to the cloud and then enhancing their value once they are there.

HCI is our core software-defined infrastructure. This modernises the data centre to take full advantage of simplicity, scalability, and security as well as redirect resources to frontline services.  It also prepares the organisation to take full advantage of the cloud

Hybrid allows the full value of the cloud to be utilised with tailored solutions and interoperability 

Nutanix delivers a comprehensive portfolio of cloud solutions that helps enterprises of different scale, across industries. Our software products are divided into three categories- Nutanix Core, Nutanix Essentials and Nutanix Enterprise.

 Our portfolio of solutions includes:

1. 1. Nutanix Core – Modernize the Datacenter 
      1. Nutanix Acropolis (AOS)
      2. Nutanix AHV
      3. Nutanix Prism
   2. Nutanix Essentials – Shift to Private Cloud
      1. Nutanix Prism Pro
      2. Nutanix Calm
      3. Nutanix Flow
      4. Nutanix Files
   3. Nutanix Enterprise –Value Added Multicloud
      1. Nutanix Xi Leap
      2. Nutanix Xi Frame
      3. Nutanix Xi Beam
      4. Nutanix Xi Epoch
      5. Nutnix Xi IoT
      6. Nutanix Volumes
      7. Nutanix Buckets
      8. Nutanix Era
      9. Nutanix Karbon