Nutanix today announced a new set of tiers for its channel program that is determined by the number of deals closed and depth of Nutanix skills attained rather than revenue targets.
The goal of the Power to the Partner program is to make it simpler for partners of all sizes to participate at the various levels of the Nutanix channel program, says Rodney Foreman, vice president of global channel sales for Nutanix.
The program consists of three tiers spanning Master, Scaler, and Pioneer designations. The Master tier is reserved for partners that close the most deals and acquire the most certifications for Nutanix software, while the Pioneer level is available to partners that are just engaging in selling their first Nutanix solutions.
Eligibility for participating in these tiers of the Nutanix channel is limited to partners that sell solutions based on the Nutanix Acropolis stack of software running on a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) platform on a public cloud, says Foreman.
Rewards for participating in the program come in the form of access to additional sales enablement tools and marketing programs.
The Power to the Partner program, however, does not have any direct impact on the profitability associated with selling Nutanix software and hardware.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with margin,” says Foreman.
Nutanix is locked in a fierce struggle with rivals such as Dell EMC and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), both of which have channel programs that have been established for much longer. Last month Nutanix moved to close some of that distance by creating a channel program designed especially for the midmarket, where adoption of HCI appliances is still relatively nascent compared to larger enterprise IT organizations.
It may take a while before HCI appliances completely supplant rack-based systems that rely on external storage systems. But as new workloads continue to be deployed on HCI appliance, it’s now more a matter of if versus when that will occur.
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