Dive Brief:
- Nutanix added incentives for lifecycle management, including referrals, renewals and cross-selling rebates, in a partner program update on Thursday. The hyperconverged infrastructure platform vendor also created a track for systems integrators in the Elevate Partner Program that offers SI-specific referral incentives.
- Premier partners can qualify for business development funds through a 1% cashback-style model based on total contract value sales, Nutanix Channel Chief Christian Goffi told Channel Dive. The company plans to launch an AI-based Deal Coach assistant that uses customer and public data for prospecting in the second half of this fiscal year.
- “This is an evolution of our current program, but one that is marking the way where we want to lead our partners,” Goffi said. “If we use the old Gretzky quote: we want to skate to where the puck is going to be.”
Dive Insight:
While Nutanix continues to reward partners for landing new clients, the program updates place emphasis on what happens after an initial sale. Partners earn rebates by introducing solutions such as the Nutanix Enterprise AI platform, which deploys and manages large language models and agents, or the multicloud management tool Nutanix Kubernetes.
“We live in such a high-pressure sales environment that you can't help but land an account and immediately go to another one,” Goffi said. “What we're saying to our partners here is: let's go deeper with fewer. Let's do it right. Let's ensure adoption, and that's the path that gets us to a better place.”
Nutanix also added service badges to the program, giving partners a way to showcase validated competencies and capabilities. Vendor badges can reduce customer hesitation on complex migrations, according to Goffi.
The value proposition for partners is solving customer infrastructure problems collaboratively.
“We talk about services and cross-selling and life-cycle, but what do I really need from the channel? What are we doing with this Elevate evolution? It's really that we're guiding the partners toward a place where we need them to be much more of a solutions consultant, a solutions provider that combines all these pieces together,” Goffi said.
