The Beam service that Nutanix announced at their spring customer event was designed for the public cloud. The integration into the Nutanix private cloud, available by the end of the calendar year will allow customers to determine whether the private cloud or a specific public cloud makes the most sense for a given workload.
Greg Smith, Nutanix’s Vice President of Product and Technical Marketing
In May, at their .NEXT event, Nutanix announced Nutanix Beam, their first software-as-a-service [SaaS] offering, which enabled more accurate resource planning in the public cloud by providing deep visibility and detailed analytics to illustrate how clouds are being used. Nutanix always intended to extend Beam to private clouds on Nutanix clusters, particularly to show customers whether the private cloud or a particular public cloud would be the best choice for their workload. Today, they are announcing the new updates to Beam will extend its functionality to Nutanix private cloud deployments. This is scheduled to be available by the end of 2018.
“This is an important milestone for Nutanix in our journey to bring multi-cloud solutions to our customers,” said Greg Smith, Nutanix’s Vice President of Product and Technical Marketing. “Beam is a cost optimization solution for the public cloud. The news is that we have now integrated it into our system for private clouds as well to give IT leaders a single pane of glass that provides the critical insight to make informed decisions.”
When Nutanix acquired Beam it was purely a public cloud solution, and they initially sold it as such.
“Everything we do is to help customers build and operate private clouds,” Smith said. “However, when we acquired Beam as a SaaS service, it was a popular service and we didn’t want to take that away from customers. We promised we would extend it, and we promised integration with the rest of Nutanix.”
With the new API-level integration with the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS, Beam will now provide customers with cost visibility into Nutanix software licenses so they can understand the cost of their Nutanix clusters that have been deployed and cost of software licenses allocated to each cluster. The continued visibility of the entirety of the customer’s public cloud consumption gives the customer a total perspective of all their clouds. It also facilitates more effective governance and compliance with regulations.
“Customers can now use Beam to get not only detailed information on worlkloads in AWS and Azure but can look at their cost on a per-cluster basis on Nutanix – and can get recommendations about which cloud would be more effective for a particular workload,” Smith said.
Smith noted that while there is significant pent-up demand for Beam in Nutanix private clouds, the extent to which customers will deploy it there really depends on their particular situation.
“We have more than 10,000 customers and as we introduce them to Beam, the reception has been tremendous,” Smith said. “They saw utility in their current cloud operations with AWS and Azure, but the natural question was around getting the same functionality for their Nutanix environment. It’s very much a customer choice issue. Some will use it for only their public clouds. Some will want it for Nutanix environments, but as customers move to multi-clouds, we think it will be popular to help make their cloud boundaries invisible.”
Smith said the expansion of Beam to the Nutanix private cloud will provide the Nutanix channel with an additional opportunity.
“We align closely with the channel community, and we expect this will be a boon for partners,” he stated. “They will be able to go to existing Nutanix customers and offer them a powerful SaaS service that can be implemented immediately and demonstrate value from the first day. That’s what partners want – the ability to bring new solutions and show their value on day one.”
Beam for Nutanix on-prem deployments is scheduled to be available by the end of 2018. While specific pricing details will be made available closer to the general release, Smith said that it will be similar to the Beam public cloud cost model, where the price is based on the amount of cloud used.
