Nutanix follows up their certification on SAP HANA non-production environments in June with the expected – but still very important – announcement that they have now been certified for SAP HANA production environments as well.

Greg Smith, Nutanix’s Vice President of Product and Technical Marketing

In June, Nutanix made a long-anticipated announcement that they had expanded their relationship with SAP, with the certification of testing, development and other non-production SAP HANA workloads on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud for Nutanix’s AHV platform. Now Nutanix has dropped the other shoe, with the announcement that they have been certified by SAP for production HANA deployments as well. This meets the schedule Nutanix laid out in the spring for attainment of the production certification when the first certification for the non-production environments was received. It also makes Nutanix the only SAP-certified partner on Nutanix’s AHV hypervisor.

“This is something that was very much expected,” said Greg Smith, Nutanix’s Vice President of Product and Technical Marketing. “We had already completed all the testing with SAP. We just had to complete a few other tasks in order to be certified for production workloads. This is the culmination of a three-year journey of working with SAP to support their full portfolio. It started with a certification on their NetWeaver data warehousing offering in 2015. That launched us into the core application marketplace. This certification for SAP HANA production environments rounds out our full SAP support.”

Many top Nutanix partners also have significant SAP practices. When the original certification with SAP around non-production environments was about to be announced, Terry Buchanan, Vice President Technology and General Manager at Toronto-headquartered partner Zycom said that this would be massive for them.

“This is something that we have been waiting for for a long time, and that many of our customers have been asking us about,” he told ChannelBuzz. “We have customers now who have just been waiting for this announcement.”

Zycom already has an extensive SAP practice, and has been Nutanix’s Canadian partner of the year for five years in a row. However Smith emphasized that this latest HANA news is a very big deal even for partners who aren’t in Nutanix’s top tier like Zycom, and even for partners who may not even sell SAP at all.

“This is very important news for all of our partners,” he stated. “They are also on a journey with Nutanix to modernize enterprise data centres. That necessarily involves them bringing in HCI to run all workloads in the data centre environment. Our certification on all aspects of SAP HANA means that they can now sit down with their customers, and can use this certification to show that Nutanix HCI can run all workloads – including the most demanding ones like SAP HANA. There are no exceptions. Nutanix can now support all enterprise workloads – bar none.”

Smith said that while Nutanix is now certified on all the demanding apps that are widely used through data centres, there are many much more localized apps where they are not yet certified. However, he said that the SAP production certification means that this really doesn’t matter much.

“We are now fully certified on all the top-tier apps,” he said. “There will always be other applications which are specific to a given industry or a given vertical, many of which are database-driven. Customers who run them would love for us to be specifically certified on those applications, But when they see Nutanix fully certified on HANA, and know that we can support that kind of demanding large-scale application, they know that we they can certainly run their industry-specific workload. That’s another reason why this news is so important. It gives additional credibility in selling beyond SAP environments as well.”

The full SAP certification of HANA on Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software is active now.