Nutanix is making a major initiative targeting service provider customers, which sees it introduce a program that lets them pay for their infrastructure by subscription, as they are paid themselves.
Greg Smith, Nutanix’s Senior Director of Product Marketing
Hyperconverged solutions vendor Nutanix is targeting the service provider market with FlexPrice, a new subscription-based way to purchase Nutanix that is specifically designed for this market. It is the first stage of what the company says will be a sustained initiative to expand its presence in this space, and will be followed up down the line with product that is specifically targeted for the needs of service providers. The subscription pricing will only be available for service providers, not for enterprises.
“Nutanix has been successful selling hyperconverged infrastructure to mid-sized and global companies, premised on simplicity, scalability and lower TCO,” said Greg Smith, Nutanix’s Senior Director of Product Marketing. “These same benefits we know we can bring to the service provider community.”
Smith said that while Nutanix does have service provider customers today, they believe they can get much deeper penetration of this market. They are targeting Tier 1 and Tier 2 service providers as well as national and regional MSPs.
“We can help all variety of service providers build profitable practices,” he said. “Nutanix is committed to bringing the same simplicity and performance to service providers that we have to the enterprise. This is a long term commitment, which also includes a product road map and new capabilities.”
The product specifically designed for the service provider market is not yet ready to be announced. What is ready, however, is the new subscription-based way for this class of customer to pay for Nutanix infrastructure.
“A business challenge faced by service providers is that they make large investments in infrastructure which precede their revenues,” Smith said. “With FlexPrice, for the first time, they will be able to get Nutanix software on a subscription basis, so they no longer have to make that large upfront capital investment.” The subscriptions are available, in 3, 6, 12 and 36 month terms, which were the ones most requested in service provider feedback.
“The idea is to lower the upfront capital investment, and benefit as well from our simplicity and faster time to market as they roll out new services,” Smith said.
Smith acknowledged that allowing service providers to purchase like this is pretty much table stakes to go after this business in a major way, but emphasized that Nutanix’s infrastructure is particularly well suited to this model.
“Subscription pricing is a requirement in today’s fiercely competitive market, but we are ideally suited to it because our flexible Pay As You Grow model,” he said. “This allows a customer to start small, with as few as three servers, and take advantage of our unique scalability to grow, with performance that grows linearly, and scales to large proportions with no limit. We are unique in that respect, and we have customers who run Nutanix clusters with more than 100 nodes. No other hyperconverged vendor has our scalability and is as qualified to use this to meet the needs of large service providers. In addition, our consumer grade simplicity means that a data centre infrastructure built on Nutanix requires far fewer resources to deploy, manage and scale, which means they can invest more in building differentiated services and less in maintaining their data centre infrastructure.”
Nutanix expects they will get into the service provider market the same way that they got into most of their enterprise and midmarket accounts, by initially meeting a specific project need, and growing from there.
“When you bring a new technology into the enterprise data centre which offers a new approach, the most common way to get in was to address a specific application,” Smith said. “With the service provider market, it’s similar, but instead of a new application, it’s for a new service, like desktops-as-a-service. They also need a model that allows them to add new tenants in a clean fashion, which is hard with traditional infrastructure, because they typically have to overprovision. It’s easy with Nutanix.”
Nutanix is hosting a FlexPrice webinar on September 23: at http://go.nutanix.com/flex-‐price-‐for-‐ service-‐providers-‐webinar.html.
