While the new Velocity program is not focused solely on Lenovo, Lenovo is actively participating in it, with new HX product bundles and a new software HCI product which is also well suited for enterprise customers.
Rodney Foreman, Vice President of Global Channel Sales, Nutanix
Nutanix has introduced a new channel program specifically targeted at the lower part of the market. The new Nutanix Velocity program is termed a midmarket focus program, but its sweet spot is the sub-500 seat market, making its focus on the lower end of the midmarket as well as larger SMBs.
“I would describe the focus of the program as organizations with 500 employees or less,” said Rodney Foreman, Vice President of Global Channel Sales, Nutanix.
The Nutanix Velocity program includes accelerated selling processes, incentives and marketing investments designed specifically for partners focused on this market segment.
“The Velocity program is designed to deliver the benefits of selling Nutanix enterprise cloud offerings to customers at an affordable price while enabling partners to have a smooth selling process with predefined and preconfigured modules for the midmarket,” Foreman said. “It’s a very frictionless offering, which is designed to scale, and not just on pricing. We have revised some processes to make it easy and quick to execute on these opportunities and have put in place tools with the marketing behind it to build pipelines.”
Out of the gate, twelve of these bundled modules will be available – eight from Nutanix and four HX product bundles from Lenovo, one of Nutanix’s key strategic partners.
“Lenovo will play an important part in the Velocity program, and is providing special price bundles, but it’s not just a program around our Lenovo products,” Foreman said. “We are providing those bundles of our own that are not specific to Lenovo.
“We’ve had a solid and growing relationship with Lenovo for some time,” Foreman added. “Velocity is just a way to accelerate that growth and target a certain area of the market where we have a lot of potential together. I do believe that we will gain Lenovo partners who will become Nutanix partners, just like when our new XC core pricing and licensing model announced earlier this year gained us a lot of new Dell partners. We are not, however, dependent on obtaining new partners to have success with Velocity. We have very capable partners now who have customers who are suitable for these bundles.”
In addition to the bundles for the Lenovo HX appliance, Lenovo and Nutanix are also launching a new hyperconverged software-ready product offering, Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Certified Nodes.
“ThinkAgile HX Certified Nodes span the midmarket and the enterprise, so it isn’t just specific to this program’s target market,” Foreman said. They provide a robust offering that let partners build their own deployment and professional services opportunities on solutions built on HX Certified Nodes, with choices of software licensing terms and conditions that are most optimal for the customer’s specific business needs. The Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Certified Nodes offering is also eligible for the Nutanix New Customer Acquisition Rebate program announced to channel partners earlier this year.
Distribution for the solutions sold through the Velocity will not change, and will go through the same distribution as previously.
“Our VAD partners will play a key role in this, and are excited about it because of its frictionless nature,” Foreman said. “Our reseller partners that we discussed this with are also very excited about the program.”
The Nutanix Velocity program is available immediately worldwide. A webinar on it for the Americas and EMEA will take place on Thursday, June 28t, at 11 AM EST at https://nutanix.webex.com/nutanix/onstage/g.php?MTID=eaaada21ccfec2af5b881244b03a89445.
