Nutanix Launches ‘Core-Based’ Pricing Model And Metering

“The pricing and the metering is really going to give our customers now the ability to pay per core. And that’s going to give them a lot more flexibility and control around their cost structure,” Nutanix’s Channel Chief Christian Alvarez tells CRN.

Nutanix is changing the way it sells its software portfolio by now enabling core-based pricing and metering, while also streamlining its 15 different products and brands into just five offerings.

“We’re going to a core-based pricing model and metering. This has been big-time demand by our customers and partners,” said Christian Alvarez, Nutanix’s senior vice president of worldwide channel sales and global channel chief in an interview with CRN. “The pricing and the metering is really going to give our customers now the ability to pay per core. And that’s going to give them a lot more flexibility and control around their cost structure.”

On Tuesday, the San Jose, Calif.-based hyperconverged software star launched a simplified product portfolio to better align with customer requirements in a multi-cloud world. Nutanix has simplified packaging, metering and pricing to allow partners to offer better hybrid cloud solutions to customers without the complexity.

“Many customers have gone to the public cloud and then they’ve realized, ‘Whoa, my cost is really getting out of control.’ And this is why multi-cloud, on-prem and hybrid cloud have really become such a huge use case and very attractive to them,” said Alvarez. “So by going towards a core-metered offering, from a billing and cost perspective, it really gives the customer more control of their investments.”

[Related: AWS, GCP, Oracle, Azure, SAP Lead Cloud DBMS Market: Gartner Magic Quadrant]

Nutanix has built new unified cloud platforms by moving its 15 products and brands into five new offerings: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure; Nutanix Cloud Manager; Nutanix Unified Storage; Nutanix Database Service; and Nutanix End User Computing Solutions.

Rick Gouin, chief technology officer at Winslow Technology Group, a Waltham, Mass.-based Nutanix partner, said a simplification of Nutanix’s portfolio was needed in the channel.

“A simplification of branding, licensing and pricing is a huge benefit to our own sellers,” said Gouin. “Today, it can definitely be challenging to figure out which software titles are required for which features and how they are licensed. Is it by CPU? Is it by number of SSPs? Is it by this system score? For a seller who maybe doesn’t live and breathe in the Nutanix environment every day, it can be confusing to wrap your arms around what do we need as a solution for a particular customer. For a partner—who represents multiple vendors—simplifying the titles, the licensing and the packaging, is going to make it easier for us to position the product.”

Nutanix’s New 5 Offerings

The new simplified portfolio brings together Nutanix’s product capabilities across on-premises and public clouds to deliver consistent infrastructure, data services, management, and operations for applications in virtual machines and containers.

The Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides a complete software solution including virtual compute, storage and networking for virtual machines and containers, that can be deployed in data centers or in public clouds.

The Nutanix Cloud Manager is for building and managing cloud deployments with a focus on driving consistent governance across private and public clouds, with features such as monitoring and automated remediation.

Nutanix’s Unified Storage delivers distributed and software-defined storage for file, volume and object storage to support a variety of workloads deployed anywhere with license portability in between.

The Nutanix Database Service aims to simplify database management across hybrid multi-cloud environments for database engines like PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle Database, with automation for provisioning, scaling, patching, protection, and cloning of database instances.

Lastly, the new Nutanix End User Computing Solutions delivers virtual apps and desktops to users worldwide from public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructure. It provides a per-user licensing option for NCI that simplifies capacity planning by matching the infrastructure cost model to that of the end user computing platform.

‘Cloud Is No longer A Destination’

“Cloud is no longer a destination or a nice to have—it’s truly become an operating model,” said Nutanix’s Alvarez. “Getting customers to effectively move their critical infrastructure, their core applications and workloads to the cloud is certainly a journey. It’s been made more complicated than it really needs to be. At Nutanix, we’ve been at war with complexity, and obsessed with customer satisfaction.”

Years ago, Alvarez said Nutanix began working on a single mission: to streamline and simplify its portfolio offerings. Nutanix has now built an enterprise-ready, unified cloud platform on HCI solutions as the core foundation.

“This perfectly fits our new pricing and packaging for our partners that want to go after new customers that are new to Nutanix and really build their solutions and offerings,” said Alvarez. “Remember, partners are attaching other complementary technologies that aren’t Nutanix. Our new pricing and packaging caters nicely for our partners to make even more with attaching services and other complementary solutions.”

Winslow’s Gouin touted Nutanix’s portfolio revamp and simplification as a win for channel partners everywhere.

“This simplification is very welcomed,” he said. “I fully expect that the strength of their product set and the breadth of their ecosystem is going to remain top notch for the foreseeable future. I expect that we will ramp up our Nutanix sales, and we’re going to continue to put a focus on Nutanix as a hyper converged vendor. We really do think it has best of breed products.”

Nutanix’s new product portfolio is currently available to customers.