‘The less time they’re spending with us, chasing information, the more time they’re spending with customers, either their existing prospects or going out and finding new [ones],’ Nutanix channel chief Dave Gwyn tells CRN.
Nutanix’s new partner portal is designed to quicken the sales cycle for its VMware alternative, with a relentless push to win partner profitability and trust, according to Dave Gwyn, the company’s senior vice president of worldwide channels and customer success.
“The less time they’re spending with us chasing information, the more time they’re spending with customers, either their existing prospects or going out and finding new [ones]”White Told crn.
San Jose, Calif.-based Nutanix has been rapidly onboarding new logos to its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) business with 2,700 added last fiscal year, bringing its current customer total to 29,000, CEO Rajiv Ramaswami told investors during the company’s August 28 earnings call. Sales increased 18 percent year over year as the industry explores alternatives to virtualization in the wake of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware in late 2023.
[RELATED: Battling Broadcom: Nutanix Adds 2,700 New Customers Amid Channel-Driven VMware Share Grab]
Gwyn (pictured above) said to help partners win those new opportunities, Nutanix set out to completely redesign the way it shares information with its partners. He said Nutanix spent the better part of a year developing the platform internally, using in-house engineers to make a product based directly on constant feedback from its partner community, which was involved as the platform was being developed.
“Instead of the semi-static partner portals that you see out there from most vendors, this thing is like a dynamic app that’s going to have just total visibility into all their business, simplify their day-to-day operations, give them actionable dashboards into active opportunities, closed opportunities, so they can take a look at what their Nutanix pipeline is and then all of their open deal registrations.”
Gwyn said the site will also give partners a look at the returns possible depending on how deals are structured.
“What are they going to make as an individual, as well as what is their company going to make if they put X amount of margin on it? What’s that going to represent? And then what rebates is this opportunity eligible for?” he said. “So they can see kind of the front-end and the back-end.”
While Nutanix pricing is usually left to the partner and distributor, the new partner portal will also give partners their contract renewal information, eventually adding performance metrics like renewal growth, churn rates, and stickiness, all meant to improve the partners access to its sales data.
“Each one of these upcoming renewals generally represents an expand opportunity,” Gwyn said. “If they go in, it’s a good time to either add this product or to scale up to the next level, or to maybe add a new workload. So we want to give our partners better visibility.”
Nutanix is making the changes with an eye towards shortening the sales cycle for its business, which is transacted nearly 100 percent through the channel. Gwyn said he wants partners to be able to get the answers they need to close deals, which is not always possible with the way current vendor partner portals are designed.
“When they need access to information and they need it with the best agility possible,” he said. “They want to come in 24/7, hit it, get the answer they need, and keep the sales cycle moving. And so we looked at our old setup through that lens, and we also looked at a lot of other vendors’ approaches to that. And then we went out, interviewed a lot of our partners, and just completely redesigned the approach.”
Part of that process was redesigning how partner information was stored and accessed, Gwyn said. The new model reorganized that to incorporate a data lake that lets Nutanix leverage a GPT-style chat feature for partners to query.
“We’re going to have a component of it called Partner GPT, where partners are going to be able to come in and like they can be in the application doing the stuff that I’ve talked about, that they can also — just like you do with ChatGPT — come in and ask Partner GPT questions. It’ll know all the information about our programs, what are they eligible for, what sort of rebates for this and that, all the details of our programs. They can just communicate via an AI interface but then it’s also going to eventually have more and more detailed information about our products, about how do they map to our salespeople, who covers this account.”