In an exclusive interview with CRN India, Michael Magura, VP, APJ, Nutanix; Harsh Vaishnav, Senior Director and Head of Channels, ASEAN/HK and India, Nutanix; and New Era Informatique Founder and CEO Dinesh Ochani, reveal the secrets behind their eight-plus-year long-term partnership. The conversation delves into how Nutanix’s partner-first vision, revolutionary Elevate program, AI-powered tools, and hybrid multi-cloud focus are enabling partners like New Era to scale business, improve customer engagement, and gain new revenue streams.
You are one of the most tenured and successful partners in the region. From your respective vantage points, what has made this partnership so effective and enduring?
Michael Magura: I manage partners across all six of our regions including India, and New Era is one of our closest Managed Partners in APJ. I’ve known Dinesh for several years, and they are a fantastic and committed partner. What makes this partnership enduring is mutual transparency: we communicate openly about what we need from each other to succeed. There is trust, and we both invest in building the business. New Era is willing to take strategic leaps, like focusing on Kubernetes and AI, and move beyond just the hyper-converged infrastructure world.
Harsh Vaishnav: Adding to Michael’s point, the Nutanix relationship has been fruitful for the last eight-plus years. Nutanix has always been transparent and simplified in our programmes, enabling us to leverage and support our partners in the market effectively. Constant initiatives, like joint planning, marketing activities and co-selling create strong momentum and progression in the market.
Choosing a partner is critical and challenging. How is the Nutanix partner ecosystem different from other alliances you have been part of?
Dinesh Ochani: Nutanix is always partner-first. The collaboration starts with joint commitment and investment to signing up and supporting new customers, which is unique in my 24 years of experience. Nutanix actively engages to ensure a sizable business is created for both organisations.
Your Elevate partner programme has evolved. How has it supported New Era in scaling its go-to-market strategy, enhancing customer engagement, or tapping new revenue streams?
Michael Magura: The Elevate programme has really evolved over the last three years. Initially, partners mainly voiced traditional concerns like backend rebates, which addressed. More importantly, we listened to our partner feedback and introduced new incentives that reward both the partner company and individual partner sales and pre-sales personnel. We also more than doubled our new logo rebates incentivising finding new customers and developed special programmes to respond to major market shifts. We also introduced a new Premiere tier to differentiate partners that are driving significant growth.
With AI emerging, are there AI-enabled programmes for partners?
Michael Magura: AI is a central focus for all companies around the world. We have been focus on developing partners breadth of knowledge to span both virtualized legacy environments as well as newer born in the cloud container based environments. We are placing a lot of focus on equipping our partners to have deeper and more meaningful AI conversations. This includes the ability to host POCs and have confidence in promoting a comprehensive platform, as enterprises pivot from predominately virtualisation only environments to a broader platform that supports both legacy and new application development.
Dinesh Ochani: Kubernetes is foundational for AI application development and deployment. Companies like New Era benefit from upskilling to support and enable our customer’s AI journey from vision to implementation and management.
Michael Magura: We proactively support partners via programmes which incentivise identifying and closing new customers. One such program that has gained a lot of traction is Surge, which allows partners to identify companies not yet Nutanix customers and reap rebates up to 40% for new account closures. And on AI, we leverage our own technology which can be seen with the newly updated partner portal, now using agentic AI and GenAI to guide partners to information on certifications, rebates and enablement, enhancing their efficiency to bring solutions to market more quickly.
India is diverse. How do you tailor programmes to ensure partner success across regions?
Michael Magura: We have Focus Partners and a broad channel, including distribution partners. We incentivise new partners from day one, ensuring they are able to grow their business with Nutanix as soon as they transact their first deal.
Harsh Vaishnav: Hybrid multi-cloud adoption is accelerating in India, and Nutanix’s seamless platform across public and private clouds allows customers flexibility and predictability, leading to substantial cost savings.
Can you share examples of co-selling, innovation, or joint wins?
Dinesh Ochani: Recent wins include media sector broadcasters bringing workloads from public cloud to on-premises Nutanix solutions, and realizing significant cost savings.
Michael Magura: One win we’re very proud of came with a major service provider in India were we re-engineered their environment to support both applications running in a virtualized environment as well as building and running new applications in a containerised framework. The collaboration is best in class globally, demonstrating the value of strong partners and platforms in India and leading solutions offered here.
Looking ahead, what new capabilities, services, or market segments are you eyeing together?
Harsh Vaishnav: Our joint focus is to continue developing our partners ability to implement hybrid multi-cloud and application modernisation solutions via Kubernetes and container-based solutions, as well as AI-ready infrastructure over the next 12-18 months.
Dinesh Ochani: New Era has invested in building a strong certified Nutanix team across the portfolio, ensuring smooth deployments and customer experiences.
Michael Magura: The NKP platform underpins AI strategies and has received recognition from third-party agencies like Gartner and Forrester, validating both the vision and the platform. This transition is in the early stages and we expect substantial growth and migration in India over the next 12-24 months.
