HCI itself has transformed from Hyper Converged Infrastructure to Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure: Balakrishnan Anantharaman, Nutanix

Nutanix recently announced new capabilities to its Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure which will result in significant innovations to the datacenter and cloud markets. Nutanix also announced partnerships with AWS and Microsoft Azure, to help Indian organizations on their journey to finding the ideal cloud environment for their business. Balakrishnan Anantharaman, VP and MD-Sales, India and SAARC, Nutanix, tells us how his company is looking at bigger opportunities that are emerging in the hybrid cloud space.

Some edited excerpts:

What are some of the biggest trends you are witnessing with respect to the adoption of hybrid cloud?
Our recently launched Hybrid Cloud Survey found that 85% of organizations believe that a hybrid cloud environment is the ideal IT model. The pandemic has pushed the agenda for digital transformation forward and enterprises are evaluating a hybrid approach as part of that journey. However, risk, governance, security and spend have also been brought into the forefront as enterprises embark on this journey.
Enterprises are looking for solutions that enable them to manage multiple cloud environments (including private and multiple public clouds) seamlessly, with similar policies, tooling and processes. The use of multiple clouds – whether public, private or at the edge – allows businesses to bring their IT platforms to where it is most needed.

Our research shows that flexibility will remain a critical consideration, and one which can only be achieved through consistent constructs, operations and tools. Hybrid cloud is the ideal choice for this, as it not only addresses immediate business requirements, it also enables and empowers organizations to prepare for a multi-cloud future.

What are some of the major growth drivers for the adoption of hybrid cloud?
Due to the pandemic,enterprises are moving towards digitization at a quicker pace, and those that had already embarked on their transformation journey are now looking to automate their operations to become even more agile and efficient.

Currently, there are two primary requirements driving organizations’ hybrid cloud adoption: infrastructure modernization and application modernization. For infrastructure modernization, companies want to achieve greater resiliency, so they are navigating a shift from legacy systems to modern infrastructure. For application modernization, enterprises are looking to enable their customers to run/use their applications anywhere, with just a few clicks.

Following the pandemic, the success of enterprises will depend on their ability and agility to innovate, drive cost efficiencies and manage risks successfully in this digital world.These enterprises will rely on software, cloud and automation to deliver more with less.

Has the Covid 19 situation altered infrastructure led buying in any way? If yes, what are some of the major changes witnessed?

With respect to infrastructure platforms, the focus for enterprises is on ensuring business continuity, resiliency, and using automation to the best extent possible. Enterprises are looking to strengthen their core business offerings and competencies.We are observing the trend of non IT/ITeS companies outsourcing the management of their IT infrastructure or datacenters to service providers based on SLAs.

Along with automation, the emphasis is on improving the utilization of the existing assets in a proactive manner with parameters like AIOps etc. Additionally, consumption models are changing with more customers looking at Opex rather than Capex. This is where the Nutanix subscription model-led multi-cloud software platform helps customers manage their investments,especially in the current scenario of constrained costs, as it allows our customers to invest in what they require just for the present.

What are some of the biggest opportunities for Nutanix currently and how do you see this panning out in the post Covid-19 era?

Nutanix is positioned excellently as the man in the middle of this entire cloud journey for our customers. As HCI itself has transformed from Hyper Converged Infrastructure to Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, we see tremendous opportunities in areas like- building seamless cloud-native applications with container management across multi-cloud, seamless migration of lift and shift workloads across multi-clouds, database management automation, cloud cost governance and optimization, multi-cloud Desktop as a Service (DaaS).

Focus will also shift to performance-based workloads like transaction processing systems and security log analytics processing in Financial institutions, or VDI performance for Work from Anywhere environments, and the processing and storing of structured and unstructured data for analytics on the same infrastructure platform, e.g e-KYC or user recommendations.

While we are already growing in the BFSI, IT/ITeS, Government, Healthcare and Manufacturing sectors, we are targeting growth in the Telecom sector as well.

We are also executing plans to grow our business in Tier-II markets along with increasing our presence in Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

How have the partnerships with major cloud vendors such as AWS and Microsoft influenced hybrid cloud adoption and deployment?
Our recently announced partnerships with Microsoft Azure and AWS provide customers a simple yet delightful solution for organizations looking to accelerating their journey of cloud adoption. We recently announced the general availability of Nutanix Clusters on Amazon Web Services, which extends flexibility, portability and ease of use of our platform software, along with all our other Nutanix solutions. Further, our Azure partnership delivers a hybrid solution with seamless application, data, and license mobility across on-premises and Azure environments, using Nutanix Clusters on Azure.

For organizations, having a single pane of management to control and manage their hybrid and multi cloud environments with one click simplicity can help accelerate their approach to cloud adoption, and streamline their operations and costs.

Future outlook for Nutanix in India
Our current market presence, growth and the innovation-led solution portfolio sets us up very strongly to provide every enterprise with transformative business outcomes, irrespective of where they are on their digital transformation journey- especially as they navigate the uncertain markets and times ahead.

Together with a growing channel ecosystem, we look forward to serving our customer’s digitization needs.