Distributors key to Nutanix’s APJ partner support

The rapid growth of channel partners across Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ), especially with new customers, is creating support demand that outpaces the growth of Nutanix’s channel team – a challenge the vendor’s global channel chief, David Gwyn, said he’s facing as well.

“I like what we’re doing in APJ right now,” he said to ARN at Nutanix’s .Next 25 conference. “We’re growing my team and we’re not just growing the service provider team, we’re also growing our focus on distributors.”

Gwyn said partners in the region are dispersed across different places, have different languages and different currencies.

“A focus on distributors will help us more than anything in APJ, especially as these Broadcom partners are hitting us [up],” he said.

“We’re seeing more partners coming [to] Nutanix and signing seller agreements. I can’t grow my channel managers at the same rate that we’re getting partners.”

Gwyn explained that means most of these partners can be covered by its distributors, like Dicker Data and Ingram in Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ).

“We’ve got to make sure that our distributors are strong and that they’re great at enablement and … training our partners without needing us to be involved,” he said.

The move to Nutanix has largely been attributed to the way Broadcom changed VMware’s licensing model following its acquisition.

“We recognise that our partners are businesses trying to succeed too,” he said. “When a company like Broadcom shoots a hole on the side of their ship, I don’t view that as something to capitalise on, so much as an opportunity to say we can fix the hole in the ship.”

According to Gwyn, that’s what Nutanix is trying to do, with its start a little over a year ago with its first major targeted program.

“This was called VMware Compete and it’s part of my channel program,” he said. “We provide rebates to our partners if they’re bringing us customers who want to walk away from Broadcom and look at Nutanix.

“They get extra rebates on top of the regular ones. It’s an additional, stackable rebate focused specifically on that.”

This not only fixes the hole in the leadership, continued Gwyn, “but also helps bring in customers who want to get away from the Broadcom chaos.”

Gwyn said there are four key Nutanix pillars for strategies around the changes faced by Broadcom partners.

“Profitability, product, long-term commitment and trust – those four things pre-date the Broadcom acquisition,” he said. “I continue to view this the same way. If we represent those four things, and Broadcom does not, then let’s work together. Let’s partner.”

That’s the way Nutanix leans into its partners.

“We bring you those four things,” he said. “Profitability, a great product, long-term commitment and trust. We expect our partners to do the same. That leads to effective partnerships.”

“The company announced a lot of new product partnerships and integrations we’re advancing features. You’ve got to picture partnerships with Pure, Dell, Omnissa [and] Citrix.

“We’re constantly expanding our serviceable customer market. We still remain more of a white space company than a green space one.”

Gwyn said while the vendor has a lot of customers, it also has many potential customers it hasn’t reached yet.

“When I see a lot of new partners coming to us, we’re nowhere near the saturation point,” he said. “More often than not, they bring prospects we’ve never tapped into especially with what’s going on in the Broadcom market.”

Lilia Guan travelled to Nutanix .Next 2025 as a guest of Nutanix.