Nutanix CEO Taking On VMware With Red Hat Linux, OpenShift

‘Who’s the leading provider in enterprise Kubernetes? It’s Red Hat. And we are the leading provider of HCI. So you put those two things together, obviously, you get a platform that’s really good and very competitive in the marketplace,’ Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami tells CRN.

Ramaswami On Red Hat Partnership, VMware Competition And ‘Project Autonomy’

Following a record-breaking sales quarter, CEO Rajiv Ramaswami says Nutanix joining forces with Red Hat around Kubernetes, hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid cloud will fuel its market competition against VMware.

“Who’s the leading provider in enterprise Kubernetes? It’s Red Hat. And we are the leading provider of HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure). So you put those two things together, obviously, you get a platform that’s really good and very competitive in the marketplace,” said Ramaswami in an interview with CRN.

Ramaswami said both Nutanix and Red Hat channel partners can now cross sell in their accounts and provide a “fully integrated, fully validated, fully certified and a fully supported” best-of-breed new offering. “When channel partners take this into the market, they get to put these two things together and deliver a complete full stack to a customer looking to build out and run modern apps in addition to traditional applications,” he said.

The new Nutanix and Red Hat partnership sees both companies cross certifying and tightly integrating Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), OpenShift and the Nutanix Cloud Platform solutions, aiming to drive greater sales and adoption of Red Hat’s Kubernetes platform and Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure. Red Hat’s OpenShift is now the preferred choice for full-stack Kubernetes on the Nutanix Cloud Platform, while Nutanix’s platform is now the preferred choice for HCI for REHL and OpenShift.

In an interview with CRN, Rajiv Ramaswami talks market competition against VMware, what’s ahead on the Nutanix-Red Hat R&D roadmap, and his biggest channel partner focus today with Project Autonomy.

“We have an internal project called Project Autonomy, and the whole point here is to enable our partners to be able to go soup-to-nuts,” Ramaswami said.

With Nutanix now providing virtualized storage technology that Red Hat was missing, does this new partnership help channel partners better compete against VMware?

Yes. As a Nutanix channel partner you’re looking at, who’s the leading provider in enterprise Kubernetes? It’s Red Hat. And we are the leading provider of HCI. So you put those two things together, obviously, you get a platform that’s really good and very competitive in the marketplace. It’s compelling in the marketplace for customers to run this.

In fact, we have a number of customers today who are already running OpenShift who adopted one of our platforms -- maybe they’re on Nutanix or maybe they’re on OpenShift -- we do have customers that run both as well. If you’re a Nutanix customer and you’re looking to go modern apps, there’s a natural motion to run Red Hat OpenShift on top of Nutanix. If you’re an OpenShift customer and you’re looking to modernize your infrastructure, hey, use Nutanix in there. Channel partner are recognizing these opportunities and many of our partners are likely selling both. They’re partners of Nutanix and also partners with Red Hat. It’s an opportunity for channel partners to actually cross sell in their accounts. Obviously, the full stack is very competitive in the market – it’s best of breed. So this is why we are excited about the potential here for both of us to continue gaining shared in the market with this offering.

How important is this partnership regarding the Kubernetes market landscape and competition with VMware and others?

Customers are building modern applications using Kubernetes. Red Hat is a leading provider of enterprise Kubernetes with their OpenShift platform. If you look at combining the best of breed Red Hat Kubernetes solution with a best of breed infrastructure solution provider like Nutanix - now customers get a good deal together that’s fully integrated, fully validated, fully certified and a fully supported solution. This lets customers build a hybrid cloud stack that they can run both the existing virtualization applications, as well as new cloud native applications.

When channel partners take this into the market, they get to put these two things together and deliver a complete full stack to a customer looking to build out and run modern apps in addition to traditional applications. So one platform that supports all kinds of applications.

Number two: we are mutually preferred, where Red Hat prefers our HCI platform to run their stack and we prefer their enterprise Kubernetes OpenShift offering to run on our stack. What that means is better integration, better out of the box support, and all of that. Channel partners can now lead with both of those together and sell a complete solution to their customers.

The other aspect of it for us as AHV is now fully certified with RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). So as customers are looking to broaden their use of AHV inside their environment, they know now that any Linux workloads running on RHEL can be supported fully on Nutanix platform. So I think in those both respects, this is going to be super good for customers as they look to create a best in class platform to run all their workloads. … This partnership provides customers with a full stack platform to build, scale and manage containerized and virtualized cloud native applications in a hybrid multi-cloud environment.

This Red Hat-Nutanix partnership isn’t just a one-off deal. Just how deep is this relationship and what’s ahead in the R&D roadmap between the two companies?

If you look at the solution itself, the first thing is, just make OpenShift really simple to install and deploy on an Nutanix platform – being able to bring in their installer natively, so that you can do lifecycle management together. That’s an obvious first step in terms of our R&D roadmap together because we already finished the certifications.

So the next step is really simplification of day-zero and then day-two operations. So day-zero means being able to install the complete solution and bring it out of the box together, and be able to go deploy.

Then there’s innovations around storage. We do object storage, for example, with Nutanix Objects. We have built-in Objects on our platform. So if you’re building a cloud native app, you use OpenShift to run it, and then you can use Nutanix Objects to actually be the object store for these apps. So for teams who build and validate the solutions, put them together and take them to market -- there’s a rich set of things here.

Beyond that, we are in AWS today. We are getting to Azure and so is Red Hat. So you could imagine a hybrid cloud stack that customers could deploy not only on-premise, but also across all these different clouds. So there’s just many, many things we can be doing together from an R&D perspective as we go forward.

What’s the biggest focus for you right now around channel enablement in Nutanix’s Elevate Partner Program?

The big focus for us as part of our Elevate program is to make our channel partners be able to sell more independently. So we have an internal project called Project Autonomy, and the whole point here is to enable our partners to be able to go soup-to-nuts. They should be able to identify an opportunity. They should be able to code independently. They should be able to size and then, of course, deliver the complete solution. Then build a set of services on top of it that they can go take to market.

Enabling our channel partners to be more independent in terms of doing all of this, will help them scale and drive business faster, and Nutanix benefits from the leverage that the channel can bring to us. So I’m super excited about doing more with the channel and getting the channel to come along with us on our journey and take our full portfolio to market and become our extension.