Nutanix CEO Ramaswami: Partner Interest Spiking After Broadcom-VMware Deal

Nutanix SVP of channels and customer success Dave Gwyn dug deeper into the Nutanix channel program, including a new Launchpad program intended as a shortcut for SMBs to get started.

“We developed that largely as an evolution of a couple of different starter packs that we've done in the past,” Gwyn said. “It's intended to just create an opportunity for all these disenfranchised customers that are struggling with the VMware scenario to just to get started without having to make a complete jump. Broadcom is doing a lot of bundling – ‘Here, buy this or buy nothing.’ So we deliberately did not want to come up with a bundle. It’s several different products, and the customer can choose which one's right for what they want to do. And we put big discounts on it.”

Nutanix's Dave Gwyn

Gwyn said the Nutanix Surge and another channel-led program launched last year were successful, even if he thought the channel-led program was “pretty controversial.”

“We segmented our business for the first time at Nutanix,” he said. “We view our truly serviceable market as being around 100,000 accounts that we could be going after globally. We put 80,000 of them in a segment that we call channel-led. And we pulled out all field reps for that segment; we don't have field rep coverage for any of those accounts.”

He said the strategy was to create an autonomous channel rather than a fulfilment channel.

“For years, every time a partner brought us an opportunity and registered, we jumped in with them,” Gwyn said. “The partners were never developing an autonomous offer; they always had field reps who were more than happy to run with these opportunities. By pulling them out, there became no option. Now, our reps are still going to work with partners, but only on the accounts where they're working opportunities. Those 80,000 partners are leading.”

The second part of the channel-led program was an internal group under Gwyn called CLARC (channel-lead autonomous resource center). CLARC's mission is to support and enable partners in the channel-led segment.

“We ended up with partners who work well with our field teams and also partners who work well autonomously,” he said.

“So that's been growing rapidly. It's been a very good exercise, year to date. That was a pretty controversial one. Some loved it, some didn't love it. And so it was a risky moment, and it's worked out well. Most partners now are actually pretty enthused about it. But the key to it is CLARC. We're not throwing them out there by themselves," said Gwyn.

Nutanix customers were less familiar with GPT-in-a-Box than with the vendor’s other products. GPT-in-a-Box is the Nutanix generative AI bundle that launched last year and received a 2.0 update this week. Of course, customers are familiar with AI and many use it in other ways.

“You stumped me,” Rady Children’s Hospital CTO Scott Voigts said when asked about GPT-in-a-Box. “I didn’t know anything about that.”

He does use AI, however, particularly for automating processes that had been performed manually.

“The problem with AI right now is that it’s the buzzword,” he said. “Every day I have to fend off vendors with a stick who want to sell me AI solutions.”

Voigts said AI is useful for automating tasks such as patching and re-booting services, and proactive maintenance.

“But if it's not going to move the needle on where I'm trying to get to where machines are taking care of machines. I don't know that it's worth the effort,” he said.

Boyd Gaming CIO Gregg Lowe also said he takes a measured approach to AI, but already finds it useful.

“I am going to walk into AI; I'm not going to run. But I'm not going to tippy-toe either,” he said. “I'm not afraid to get the benefits of what we've seen today. My biggest concern is security around AI. You have to make sure that you have the right parameters set in place as you move forward.”

Lowe said Boyd doesn’t use generative AI, yet AI-driven automation has taken away 40% of help-desk tickets with which agents were dealing. AI has also taken more mundane tasks away from Boyd’s engineers.

“We are doing quite a bit with AI,” he said. “I'll call it automation, but it’s AI.”

Michael Parks, EVP of foundational hosting platform for Wells Fargo, also uses AI to automate customer service.

“AI is fascinating to me,” he said. “It’s an intelligent way to consume those offerings through automation and to be in a self-service model. That’s exactly what we’re looking for from an efficiency sake.”

Matt Cristinzio, lead platform engineer for SaaS banking vendor Temenos, said he finds AI useful for security purposes but is a bit overwhelmed by the attention IT vendors give it.

“Last year it was DevSecOps. Every single event you went to was DevSecOps, DevSecOps, DevSecOps,” he said. “This year, every event you go to they’re all talking about AI. I think AI is great, as long as its regulated. It’s only as good as you choose to use it.”

Cristinzio said his company uses AI in software to help protect against financial crime.

“Make sure you're doing with the right governance and security around an artificial intelligence,” he said.

Nutanix extended Kubernetes support with the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP), based on its January D2IQ acquisition. D2IQ (formerly Mesosphere) brought Nutanix a 40-person engineering team and experience with containers that pre-dates Kubernetes. D2IQ focused on Kubernetes management in recent years, and it was that capability that Nutanix wanted.

“Nutanix wanted to go all-in on cloud native,” said Tobi Knaup, founder and former CEO of D2IQ and now Nutanix Cloud Native GM. “Containers are the platform of choice for AI workloads. Our AI product runs in containers, on our Kubernetes platform.”

NKP comes in three tiers – Starter, Pro, and Ultimate. Starter edition consists of Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (NKE), which Nutanix developed and formerly called Karbon. Pro, based on D2IQ, is used for a single Kubernetes cluster and includes 30 open-source components that make it production-ready.

“I like to call it instant platform engineering,” Knaup said of NKP Pro.

NKP Ultimate provides fleet management, supporting multiple clusters through a centralized management plane. Ultimate allows customers to manage Kubernetes clusters running on Nutanix on-premises, in the public cloud, and in edge and air-gapped deployments.

“We acquired D2IQ to help fill the gap around Kubernetes management for us, and to bring us a lot of open-source credibility. We are seeing almost all AI applications are Kubernetes-based," Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said.

It wouldn’t be an enterprise IT conference without an Nvidia executive. Nutanix didn’t get Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (he was at Dell Tech World in Las Vegas) but Nvidia VP of enterprise AI Justin Boitano dropped by to speak with Nutanix chief commercial officer Tarkan Maner.

They talked about Nutanix’s integration of Nvidia NIM microservices in its GPT-in-a-Box launched this week to support generative AI applications.

“AI, it's happening. But most importantly, it's happening in the enterprise,” Maner said.

Boitano talked about how effective generative AI is moving fast and is something of a chain reaction.

“Generative AI is easy to say,” he said. “But when you step back and think about it, we're talking about intelligence of a non-human form powering your business. And we've all had our first contact with generative AI and cloud services like ChatGPT. But the AI open model builders are building amazing models and catching up in terms of accuracy. And it’s not useful to enterprises unless they can connect these models to their data. What we see happening in enterprises is they're starting to build on applications using AI agents.”

He said these agents generate chains of models working together.

“For example, they’ll allow a user to ask a question to the first model, the first one will create a reasoning plan, it might go to a second model to search a structured database or a third model to go to an unstructured database,” Boitano said. “It will look at that and reason through whether or not it adequately answers the question to the user. And then it will generate the response ultimately.”

He said Nvidia built NIM to take advantage of these series of models. NIM works with the model builders, performance-optimizes the models to make them power efficient, secures the open-source runtime, and delivers a microservice to run in a cloud or data center. Developers can connect the models to solve business problems and handle tasks such as customer support.

“Ultimately, this is the future of this non-human intelligence helping you fast track your business with generative AI,” Boitano said.

Will virtual machines soon be out to pasture?

John Deere is known for selling farm equipment, but the tech world also knows it as an innovator. Jason Wallin, senior principal architect at John Deere, took the stage at Nutanix Next to share his insights on the latest IT developments.

Wallin spoke of the rapid evolution of data center technology that IT personnel must keep up with. It’s moving so fast that virtual machines may be going the way of the mainframe.

“If you think about how we've done our infrastructure rollouts in the past, we've declared something a legacy technology, and then work our way through that until we can work it out of the environment,” he said. “We did the same thing with mainframe about 10 years ago. And this year, we declared VM technologies as a technology that we now see as legacy. Everything that we're starting to build going forward is cloud native, so you think about containers, you think about database-as-a-service and how to deliver those.”

“The first thing is their being able to deliver something that we can't do ourselves," Wallin said, when asked what he looks for from an IT vendor. "Also, being really focused on customer value and how we can grow with those companies to work with us. One of the things that really drove us toward Nutanix is the maniacal customer focus. And the ability to add features and do cloud-native things in the environment where we had previous infrastructure.”

Will virtual machines soon be out to pasture?

John Deere is known for selling farm equipment, but the tech world also knows it as an innovator. Jason Wallin, senior principal architect at John Deere, took the stage at Nutanix Next to share his insights on the latest IT developments.

Wallin spoke of the rapid evolution of data center technology that IT personnel must keep up with. It’s moving so fast that virtual machines may be going the way of the mainframe.

“If you think about how we've done our infrastructure rollouts in the past, we've declared something a legacy technology, and then work our way through that until we can work it out of the environment,” he said. “We did the same thing with mainframe about 10 years ago. And this year, we declared VM technologies as a technology that we now see as legacy. Everything that we're starting to build going forward is cloud native, so you think about containers, you think about database-as-a-service and how to deliver those.”

“The first thing is their being able to deliver something that we can't do ourselves," Wallin said, when asked what he looks for from an IT vendor. "Also, being really focused on customer value and how we can grow with those companies to work with us. One of the things that really drove us toward Nutanix is the maniacal customer focus. And the ability to add features and do cloud-native things in the environment where we had previous infrastructure.”