Nutanix has identified South Africa as a major growth market, and has committed investment and resources to expanding its operations in the area.
Paul Phillips, regional director: Western Europe & Africa at Nutanix, tells IT-Online that the company’s strategy is to grow and meet the demands of the region, identifying places in which to grow as it sees opportunities in the region.
As part of this week’s launch, Nutanix will build out a suite of sales and technical Nutanix skills to support partners, as well as the appointment of a country manager to follow in early 2015. The company currently works through a
local distributor, Bitrate, and a host of partners that have made a considerable investment into resourcing teams to deploy Nutanix in the region.
In addition, as part of its global multiple distribution strategy, Nutanix will appoint an additional distributor and has already established a partnership with official distributor Bitrate, as part of an accredited training centre.
There are currently three people in the local office, and this is expected to expand soon. In addition, Nutanix will work with partners to meet customer needs.
“Due to the fact that we will be bringing Web-scale infrastructure for the first time to South African enterprises, we will need to provide local customers with the support they need to approach this market,” Phillips says. “As of today we will have sales and technical expertise as well as support and training in country, all of which are designed to ensure that all customers will have all the support they need right off the bat.
“Bitrate, our local distributor, is also an official training partner.”
Globally, Nutanix is a 100% channel company, a model that it will carry through to the South African offer.
“While today marks us placing an official stake in the ground, we have already established a number of skilled partners and resellers in the region with the latest being Bytes Systems Integration. Other resellers include SQIM/CES-H, VMXperts, Kunjani Solutions, Cybervine IT Solutions and Eurotech Computer Services South Africa.”
Phillips adds that Nutanix is actively recruiting channel partners that understand the revolution in the datacentre and partners who embrace new technologies around virtualisation. “We want to partner with forward-looking companies willing to adapt to new technologies.”
Nutanix Web-scale converged infrastructure delivers enterprise infrastructure with Web-scale virtues. These virtues include running commodity hardware with x86 servers, ensuring that all of the intelligence or IP is in the software, the data is distributed, the system boasts self-healing capabilities that ensures consistent and reliable uptime of application, as well as API-based automation and rich analytics
Mike Broderick, divisional director: data centres and storage at Bytes Systems Integration, comments: “Bytes is really excited about our partnership with Nutanix and the potential it holds for our customers. What really interests us about the partnership is the potential opportunity it presents that will enable us to take the same agility that companies like Google and Amazon enjoy, directly to our enterprise customers.
“We believe that through this relationship we will be able to enable our customers to emulate these big on demand IT shops, simply, cost effectively and very rapidly, using commodity IT components.”