https://www.channelfutures.com/wp-content/themes/channelfutures_child/assets/images/logo/footer-new-logo.png
  • Home
  • Technologies
    • Back
    • SDN/SD-WAN
    • Cloud
    • RMM/PSA
    • Security
    • Telephony/UC/Collaboration
    • Cable
    • Mobility & Wireless
    • Fiber/Ethernet
    • Data Centers
    • Backup & Disaster Recovery
    • IoT
    • Desktop
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Analytics
  • Strategy
    • Back
    • Mergers and Acquisitions
    • Channel Research
    • Business Models
    • Distribution
    • Technology Solutions Brokerages
    • Sales & Marketing
    • Best Practices
    • Vertical Markets
    • Regulation & Compliance
  • MSP 501
    • Back
    • MSP 501 Rankings
    • NextGen 101 Rankings
  • Intelligence
    • Back
    • Galleries
    • Podcasts
    • From the Industry
    • Reports/Digital Issues
    • Webinars
    • White Papers
  • Channel Futures TV
  • EMEA
  • Channel Chatter
    • Back
    • People on the Move
    • New/Changing Channel Programs
    • New Products & Services
    • Industry Honors
  • Resources
    • Back
    • Channel Futures 20: Top Tech Providers
    • Advisory Boards
    • Industry Organizations
    • Our Sponsors
    • Advertise
    • 2023 Editorial Calendar
  • Awards
    • Back
    • 2022 MSP 501
    • Channel Influencers
    • Circle of Excellence
    • DE&I 101
    • Technology Advisor 101 (TA 101)
    • Channel Leaders Lists
  • Events
    • Back
    • 2023 Call for Speakers
    • CP Conference & Expo
    • MSP Summit
    • Channel Partners Europe
    • Channel Partners Event Coverage
    • Webinars
    • Industry Events
  • About Us
  • DE&I
Channel Futures
  • NEWSLETTER
  • Home
  • Technologies
    • Back
    • SDN/SD-WAN
    • Cloud
    • RMM/PSA
    • Security
    • Telephony/UC/Collaboration
    • Cable
    • Mobility & Wireless
    • Fiber/Ethernet
    • Data Centers
    • Backup & Disaster Recovery
    • IoT
    • Desktop
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Analytics
  • Strategy
    • Back
    • Mergers and Acquisitions
    • Channel Research
    • Business Models
    • Distribution
    • Technology Solutions Brokerages
    • Sales & Marketing
    • Best Practices
    • Vertical Markets
    • Regulation & Compliance
  • MSP 501
    • Back
    • MSP 501 Rankings
    • NextGen 101 Rankings
  • Intelligence
    • Back
    • Galleries
    • Podcasts
    • From the Industry
    • Reports/Digital Issues
    • Webinars
    • White Papers
  • Channel Futures TV
  • EMEA
  • Channel Chatter
    • Back
    • People on the Move
    • New/Changing Channel Programs
    • New Products & Services
    • Industry Honors
  • Resources
    • Back
    • Channel Futures 20: Top Tech Providers
    • Advisory Boards
    • Industry Organizations
    • Our Sponsors
    • Advertise
    • 2023 Editorial Calendar
  • Awards
    • Back
    • 2022 MSP 501
    • Channel Influencers
    • Circle of Excellence
    • DE&I 101
    • Technology Advisor 101 (TA 101)
    • Channel Leaders Lists
  • Events
    • Back
    • 2023 Call for Speakers
    • CP Conference & Expo
    • MSP Summit
    • Channel Partners Europe
    • Channel Partners Event Coverage
    • Webinars
    • Industry Events
  • About Us
  • DE&I
    • Newsletter
  • REGISTER
  • MSPs
  • VARs / SIs
  • Agents
  • Cloud Service Providers
  • Channel Partners Events
 Channel Futures

From the Industry


Network cables in a server room

The Doyle Report: Nutanix EVP Says New Employer Ideally Positioned to Win Stack Wars and Deliver on Promise of Hybrid Clouds

  • Written by Vendor
  • November 6, 2017
Cisco veteran Inder Sidhu named Executive Vice President of Global Customer Success and Business Operations

On a warm August evening twenty-two years ago, a promising young tech professional by the name of Inder Sidhu sat down for dinner with his wife to discuss a new career opportunity with a then up-and-coming developer of networking gear. The company was Cisco. Sidhu laid out his reasons for taking the new position. Cisco, he noted, was already a $1 billion player in networking and quickly on its way to becoming a $5 billion powerhouse. It had a visionary CEO and a product roadmap that was unlike any other in the market. After listening carefully, his wife smiled and said, “Take the job.”

This August Sidhu sat down for dinner with his wife and found himself having the very same conversation as before. Sidhu, who retired from Cisco after 20 years, was mulling another job with another tech company with ambitious plans to be the next $5-plus billion powerhouse. Like Cisco, it, too, had a visionary CEO, an enviable technology portfolio and an annual rate of growth approaching 70 percent. As she did before, Sidhu’s wife listened patiently, thought about the offer and said, “Take the job.”

In October, Sidhu did just that, officially becoming the Executive Vice President of Global Customer Success and Business Operations at Nutanix, a developer of enterprise cloud platform technology that combines compute, virtualization and storage into a software-defined solution with machine intelligence.

In this exclusive with Channel Futures, Sidhu shares what attracted him to Nutanix and why he believes it is poised to disrupt the market the way his former employer did nearly a generation ago. (Editor’s note: I worked with Sidhu on two of his books while working for Cisco, “Doing Both” and “The Digital Revolution,” both of which were published by Pearson’s Financial Times Press.)

Channel Futures: Why Nutanix? What is it about its value proposition that made you say, “this is the place for me?”

Sidhu: After taking some time off, I wanted to make sure that I landed at the right place. I promised myself that the next company I joined would have four distinct qualities. Number one, I wanted to join a company with a large market opportunity and a compelling strategic vision to capitalize on it. Number two, I wanted a company with unique and differentiated technology. Without it, you run out of fuel. The third thing I looked for in a company was whether or not its customers loved it. And finally, number four, I wanted a place that had sound values and a positive, fun culture with motivated, talented people who worked together in an environment that was free of politics and egos.

Inder Sidhu, EVP, Nutanix

Channel Futures: So, am guessing that Nutanix stacked up favorably?

Sidhu: Well, on the first point, Nutanix gets a big check. The market opportunity it is going after, enterprise and hybrid operating systems, is incredibly large—close to $100 billion. As for their technology, I asked around. I even checked with their competitors, who to a “T” all said the same thing: “Yep, their technology is damn good.” As for its customers, I checked Nutanix’s Net Promoter score. It was a staggering 90, which is almost unheard of. Clearly their customers loved them. As for culture, everyone on the board, leadership team and beyond that I met was fantastic. After getting all these checks, I began thinking, “this has to be a sign.”

Channel Futures: When you look at the landscape Nutanix competes in, how big of a company can it be?

Sidhu: I think it can be huge. The last time I jumped on the train with a $1 billion company, it went all the way to $50 billion before I stepped off. I see Nutanix having that kind of transformative potential. Now, I’m not saying that we’re going to get there overnight. But this is clearly a company with big potential. We want to first be a $5 billion company, and then a $10 billion company beyond that. Others are believers too. A week before I met our CEO, Goldman Sachs put out a note that essentially said Nutanix was a once-in-a-decade company. Why all the excitement? Nutanix is essentially building the enterprise operating system for the hybrid-cloud environment.

Channel Futures: Obviously, that’s a big deal and something that others are attempting to build, too. How does the Nutanix stack compare to others? What sets it apart, in other words.

Sidhu: Public clouds like AWS have brought unprecedented levels of agility to businesses and offered them an attractive pay-as-you-go consumption model. At the highest level, our technology allows customers to realize similar levels of agility and a similar pay-as-you-go consumption model from their on-premises infrastructure. You could think of it as “AWS-inside.” At the same time, we let our customers have the flexibility to utilize public clouds for their workloads where it makes sense, all the while making the management of and mobility between these disparate environments extremely easy—i.e., without the pain associated with “lift-and-shift” approaches. We do this by simplifying the full infrastructure stack. That way, IT teams spend less time tending to infrastructure minutiae and more time on the services that drive their businesses.

There are only a handful of technology companies that can even lay claim to offering a full stack of infrastructure software; traditional infrastructure vendors, who dealt with only a piece of the stack, are on a steady path to obsolescence. Unlike the other full-stack offerings that lock customers in, Nutanix is unique in that it allows customers complete choice and lets them make the transition from their traditional on-prem infrastructure to a cloud-like infrastructure with a single click. Other stacks have been cobbled together from a mish-mash of pre-cloud technologies and are unlikely to be able to handle the scale enterprise customers are looking for. Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud OS, on the other hand, has a robust web-scale foundation and is already being leveraged by several thousand enterprise customers as the basis of their hybrid operating environment.

So basically, Nutanix is AWS-inside, homogenized private and public cloud, complete choice, and one-click portability across multiple clouds. The ability to use Nutanix in any cloud environment makes the company a key player in the multi-cloud era.

Channel Futures: Let’s shift to you and your role as EVP of global customer success and business operations? You wrote a New York Times business best-seller called “Doing Both,” which examined the ways people and organizations sometimes have to exercise opposing muscle groups to achieve their goals. Are you going to have rely on your own advice to do both of these things at Nutanix?

Sidhu: You’re right, this is absolutely a “doing both” role. The internal job is all about helping the company run as efficiently and as “frictionlessly” as possible. The external job is all about helping customers succeed. The two goals are actually mutually reinforcing. This is incredibly important to us as we journey from being an appliance company to a software company to a SaaS company and then, ultimately, to a services company. Customers can consume our value in any manner they choose.

Channel Futures: Talk about the role that channel partners play in the success of Nutanix and how it can create opportunities for them.

Sidhu: All Nutanix sales go through partners today. We understand that in order to participate in the digital revolution that is under way, you need a key technology supplier and a trusted local partner that adds value. Nutanix offers partners a lot of opportunity to make money through meaningful engagement.

Channel Futures: Lastly, as a long-time Silicon Valley observer, give us a sense of what you see and hear today.

Sidhu: Optimism is still high. People here see the transformative power of digital technologies every day and that inspires them. And they see how innovations can translate into high valuations for employers and employees alike. You can make the argument that the valuations of private companies overshot a little bit. After all, they don’t have the same self-correcting mechanism that public companies, which report results every three months, do. Without that reality check, things for some companies got a little bit out of whack. But things now seem more reasonable. I would say that there is a ton of innovation still going on. This is especially true in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The technology is finding itself into almost everything. Then there’s cloud technology, which continues to transform but in a different way than, say, a year ago. If you were to look back a year ago, public cloud was all the rage. You heard things like, “why would people want to have a private data center?” As people realize both the technological and regulatory limitations of this thinking, they come to the conclusion that they will likely end up with a hybrid-technology solution. In that world, they will want their applications and workloads to move between clouds frictionlessly. That’s where we shine.

Tags: Agents Cloud Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs From the Industry Strategy

Most Recent


  • how to sell more
    Learn How to Sell More Solutions to Clients
    A conversation with MSP Marketing Edge's Paul Green.
  • Partner Program
    Coalesce Partners Gain Revamped Partner Program with Expanded Training, Resources
    Coalesce's data transformation solution is built exclusively for Snowflake Data Cloud.
  • call for speakers
    Channel Futures Leadership Summit Call for Speakers Open
    Speaker applications for “The New Style of Leadership” are open until July 3.
  • Faces of the Partner
    Faces of the Partner: 6 New Tech Advisors Entering the Channel
    A significant portion of the partner community is retiring. Who will replace them?

Leave a comment Cancel reply

-or-

Log in with your Channel Futures account

Alternatively, post a comment by completing the form below:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Content

  • M&A
    Why All MSPs Need to Understand the M&A Landscape
  • hurricane season
    4 Things MSPs Should Consider When Prepping for Hurricane Season
  • zero-trust
    The Benefits of Zero-Trust Security over VPNs
  • edge computing
    How to Keep Edge Computing Sites Truly Autonomous

Upcoming Events

View all

Channel Partners Europe

June 13, 2023 - June 14, 2023

Channel Futures Leadership Summit

October 30, 2023 - November 2, 2023

Channel Partners Conference & Expo

March 11, 2024 - March 14, 2024

Galleries

View all

Survey: Backups Are Prime Targets for Ransomware Attacks, Most Remain Exposed

May 26, 2023

Faces of the Partner: 6 New Tech Advisors Entering the Channel

May 26, 2023

Broadcom-VMware, Alibaba Cloud, Red Hat, Google Cloud: A Hefty Roundup

May 24, 2023

Industry Perspectives

View all

Dell Technologies World: Dell Apex Expanded Across On-Premises, Cloud and Edge

May 22, 2023

Identity Is Increasingly Valuable – and Targeted

May 18, 2023

Gaining a Competitive Advantage through AV Managed Services

May 10, 2023

Webinars

View all

From Problem to Profit: Mastering the Science of Selling Using Business Outcomes

May 9, 2023

Meet the 2023 Channel Futures Channel Influencers

April 13, 2023

DE&I Dialogue: How the Right DE&I Initiatives Can Propel Your Business

April 5, 2023

White Papers

View all

6 UCaaS Reseller Challenges and How Real World Businesses Solved Them

February 1, 2023

Frost Radar: North American UCaaS Market, 2022

February 1, 2023

The Complete Guide to White-Label UCaaS for Reseller Success

February 1, 2023

Channel Futures TV

View all

Coffee with Craig and James Episode No. 123: MartinWolf M&A Advisors, CP Expo Preview

UScellular Takes On Rivals with Partner Program Simplicity

April 21, 2023

OpenText Simplifying Deal Registration, Doubling Down on MDF

April 21, 2023

Everything-as-a-Service: CloudBlue Touts Critical Customer Transition

April 18, 2023

Twitter

ChannelFutures

Who has been a diversity, equity & inclusion role model in your career? Take a moment to honor their initiatives in… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

May 29, 2023
ChannelFutures

Paul Green @msp_voice will help MSPs gain more #customers and #sales at @ChannelEurop June 13.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

May 26, 2023
ChannelFutures

.@coalesceIO unveils revamped partner program. #datatransformation dlvr.it/SphJm4 https://t.co/s7fYAVmFGD

May 26, 2023
ChannelFutures

.@Veeam #Ransomeware survey: backups are not adequately protected, 85% suffered at least 1 attack in past year… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

May 26, 2023
ChannelFutures

.@MSPSummit call for speakers is open now through July 3. The theme for this year’s summit is “The New Style of Lea… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

May 26, 2023
ChannelFutures

Channel Futures interviewed six individuals who started an agency in the last two years. dlvr.it/SpgV6l https://t.co/JXKhJcw31A

May 26, 2023
ChannelFutures

Channel Futures interviewed six individuals who started an agency in the last two years. dlvr.it/SpgTQg https://t.co/7eIp0XgwQ2

May 26, 2023
ChannelFutures

Channel Futures interviewed six individuals who started an agency in the last two years. dlvr.it/Spg7JZ https://t.co/ETaeFysCYO

May 26, 2023

MSP 501

The industry's largest and most comprehensive partner awards program.

Newsletters and Updates

Sign up for The Channel Report, Channel Futures Update, MSP 501 Newsletter and more.

Live Channel Events

Get the latest information on the next industry-leading Channel Partners event.

Galleries

Educational slide shows and images from live events.

Media Kit And Advertising

Want to reach our audience? Access our media kit.

DISCOVER MORE FROM INFORMA TECH

  • Channel Partners Events
  • Telecoms.com
  • MSP 501
  • Black Hat
  • IoT World Today
  • Omdia

WORKING WITH US

  • Contact
  • About Us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter

FOLLOW Channel Futures ON SOCIAL

  • Privacy
  • CCPA: “Do Not Sell My Data”
  • Cookie Policy
  • Terms
Copyright © 2023 Informa PLC. Informa PLC is registered in England and Wales with company number 8860726 whose registered and Head office is 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG.
This website uses cookies, including third party ones, to allow for analysis of how people use our website in order to improve your experience and our services. By continuing to use our website, you agree to the use of such cookies. Click here for more information on our Cookie Policy and Privacy Policy.
X