Veritas wants their mutual partners with Nutanix to ramp up their joint business, including Nutanix’s cloud offerings, and they are considering making channel program changes as one way to accomplish this.
Rick Fairweather, vice president, Americas Partner Organization at Veritas
NEW ORLEANS – At the Nutanix .NEXT Conference here, data protection provider Veritas was in attendance as a Gold Sponsor. While they are looking to continue to expand their relationship with Nutanix, they made it a top priority at this event to meet with the top mutual partners of the two vendors to determine how Veritas can best support their Nutanix business.
While Veritas has provided backup support to Nutanix for years, the deeper relationship between the two companies really dates from last November.
“Our customers really brought the relationship about, by asking that we work more closely together,” said Rick Fairweather, vice president, Americas Partner Organization at Veritas, who attended the event. “I’m here to spend time not just with Nutanix, but with our common partners. We have about 40 joint partners in the Americas, and we are really focusing on a dozen of them.”
The formal partnership between Veritas and Nutanix raised the relationship to another level.
“The partnership really began around joint technology agreements and solution development, based on Nutanix’s HCI and cloud solutions,” Fairweather said. Veritas’ NetBackup enterprise data protection solution was certified to protect data workloads virtualized on the Nutanix’s AHV hypervisor, within both the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud and other public, private or hybrid cloud environments.
Fairweather said that while Nutanix has other strategic partners in the data protection space – several of whom were also at .NEXT – Veritas is Nutanix’s prime vendor partner for the enterprise.
“They see us an ideal fit for the enterprise market, while their other partners might be a better fit for other use cases,” he stated. “We assess our strategic partners in the same way.”
The Nutanix relationship still has room for expansion, Fairweather said.
“We go to market with them, but we are not on each other’s price lists,” he indicated. “We are taking a look at it. However, partners are able to order a single SKU and pull from both of us.”
Expanding the go-to-market capability among Veritas and Nutanix mutual partners is the top priority around the relationship in the short term.
“Our next two quarters are focused on improving the partner go-to-market, ensuring that they can sell us together effectively,” Fairweather said. “Most of our partners are working with the hyperconverged part of the Nutanix portfolio. The key for them is putting together an effective hyperconverged strategy with an intelligent data protection strategy.”
Fairweather said that they are also encouraging partners to get involved with the fuller breadth of Nutanix cloud solutions.
“It’s all about flexibility and choice of platform,” he stated. “It’s part of our ongoing multi-cloud data protection strategy, and this will allow our partners to expand into a new market, a lot of which is services-led.”
Fairweather suggested that Veritas channel program changes could be coming that would assist partners to expand this business.
“We are looking at ways that we can leverage our channel program, to create new incents for partners to do the behavior that we want them to do.”
