Nutanix positions itself as both willing and flexible: an ever-widening range of offerings and options aims to lower the barrier for those considering the company’s platform. Even if there are still ongoing contracts with Broadcom or new storage servers have just been delivered, Nutanix wants to get to know you.
Migrating to Nutanix is fast. That was a core message from the company during the .Next conference in Washington earlier this year, and is also emphasized by Luc Costers, Regional Leader Nutanix Belux, CIS and Eastern Europe. “It surprises customers,” says Costers. He heard companies say that if they had known how quickly the migration would actually proceed via Nutanix’s Move tool, they would have jumped on board sooner.
In practice, not everyone immediately embraces Nutanix. Even victims of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, who feel held hostage by the latter with artificially bundled services and sharply increased licensing costs, do not immediately switch.
Up to two Yyars free
Costers understands this. “Broadcom plays it smart. Customers receive license renewal proposals late, which then immediately apply for three years. They often feel obliged to sign on.” That is inconvenient for Nutanix, which positions itself as THE realistic, mature, and enterprise-ready alternative to Broadcom. Costers: “Enthusiasm for Nutanix in the market is growing, but customers can no longer take the step due to what they perceive as too small migration windows.”
Patience is a virtue, Nutanix and Costers realize. The countermove: those who have re-signed with Broadcom can, in some cases, use Nutanix licenses for up to two years free of charge in parallel within a five-year contract. “That gives customers two years to get to know the platform and arrange the migration, without having to pay license fees twice,” Costers clarifies. Only after the Broadcom contract expires (after a few months up to a maximum of 2 years) does the consumption of the new Nutanix contract begin.
A la carte
Flexibility is key. In doing so, Nutanix has learned from the old VMware. Costers: “Through contracts like the digital wallet, customers can combine the various components of the Nutanix platform as they wish, depending on what they need in their projects. This way, they can tailor our solution to their precise needs. We have significantly further developed this flexibility in recent years. Following feedback from several European countries, the entry threshold for a number of commercial offerings was reduced to 1,000 cores.”
Nutanix has also become more flexible regarding storage. The company originated as a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) specialist and still believes that HCI with a consistent platform is the solution for tomorrow’s infrastructure. However, many companies have invested in their infrastructure today, and that is typically not HCI.
One tier more or less…
3-tier remains synonymous with legacy. “But we are now also fine with 2-tier,” Costers smiles. “It’s a fact that organizations often have ongoing investments in storage. We can now link our Compute-centric platform with a number of IP-based storage systems. That is convenient for those customers and also enables more synergy for us, for example, with storage specialists like Dell and Pure at the moment. Others will be added to this list in the coming months.”
If customers then get a taste for it and eventually want more HCI, that is possible.
Luc Costers, Nutanix
Costers does not want to predict whether customers will eventually migrate to a full HCI environment. “A 2-tier solution will always contain some HCI storage,” he speculates. “If they then get a taste for it and eventually want more HCI, that is possible. But they don’t have to. They can also stick with the 2-tier approach.”
Large rcosystem
Nutanix’s openness is also evident in the world of virtual desktops, where the number of major players is no longer very large. The relationship between Nutanix and Citrix has been good for quite some time. “Nutanix effectively addresses potential issues with Xenserver,” Costers knows. “And Omnissa/Horizon for end-user computing will also run on Nutanix AHV. Customers who rely on the Omnissa solution sold by Broadcom to KKR thus get options again.”
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Costers believes Nutanix has now reached critical mass. “Previously, VMware organized an event with an extra hall full of ecosystem partners, and Nutanix needed a modest event space for that. Today, we also have a very large ecosystem. The ball is rolling, and the number of ISVs being certified on our platform is growing rapidly. We have now reached that point.”
Flexibility is paramount
That is also necessary: no software platform can flourish in isolation. Nutanix wants to run workloads on its platform, and for that, a large ecosystem is essential. Costers has no doubt that Nutanix is still only at the beginning. Among others, many customers are still to be won from Broadcom, although it will take some time before the conversion is finalized. That’s not an issue: in the meantime, Nutanix is developing functionality and flexibility, both independently and with partners.
“Nutanix invests heavily and with additional solutions for database automation, Unified Storage, a so-called opinionated stack for Kubernetes in the CNCF framework, and many additional features concerning data security and networking,” says Costers. “We can rightly speak of a Cloud Platform where our customers can securely provision virtual machines AND containers via a single environment.”
Costers concludes with a statement he brought from the US headquarters: “Nutanix has become large enough to earn the long-term trust of its customers. But also small enough to listen to the concerns and wishes of those customers.”