Nutanix relaunches partner program to drive profitability around entire ecosystem
Jelaine Doncaster, head of channel ANZ at Nutanix explains how these changes will benefit Aussie partners.
Nutanix has made changes to FY27 Elevate Partner Program in a move to help partners drive profitability around the full channel ecosystem.
According to Nutanix, the changes add incentives for referrals, renewals, and customer expansion. The company said it also increases support for partner-led services, giving partners “more opportunities” to generate revenue beyond the initial technology sale.
This new expanded program will support partners looking to grow their businesses around emerging customer requirements, including enterprise AI, cloud-native applications, and databases.
Speaking to CRN Australia about the changes, Jelaine Doncaster, head of channel ANZ at Nutanix said the commercial reality across Australia and New Zealand is that “nobody builds a sustainable channel business on box-dropping and transactional margins anymore”.
“The updates we’ve made to the Elevate Partner Program are designed to reward our partners and drive profitability across the entire customer lifecycle,” she said.
With these updates, Doncaster said the company’s goal is to put their partners in the driver's seat.
“Given the unprecedented disruption in the hypervisor market right now, customer demand for migration and cloud rationalisation across ANZ is higher than I have ever seen it,” she said.
“We want our partners leading the charge on architectural assessments, migration delivery, and day-two customer success.”
According to Doncaster, the idea for updates to the partner program was to create a “stronger co-selling motion” between Nutanix and its partners.
“We’re leaning harder into an authentic, partner-led model and are actively putting more opportunities directly into our channel’s hands,” she said.
“The updates we’ve rolled out will lead to genuine, active collaboration between systems integrators and our regional reseller and distribution community.
“In a year’s time, if our ANZ partners feel that Nutanix is their most profitable, predictable, and transparent vendor partner in the market, then Elevate has done its job.”
The program also includes system integrators (SI) where they will be able to earn referral rewards for identifying and developing Nutanix opportunities, even when they are not the partner responsible for the final sale.
“By formally welcoming SIs into Elevate, we’re recognising the heavy lifting they do for customers around advisory and design,” Doncaster explained.
“Rather than competing with our existing channel, including SIs grows the pie for everyone in our ANZ channel ecosystem as SIs regularly rely on local specialist VARs, MSPs, and our distribution partners for regional delivery, staging, and long-term operational management.
She added, “This will create a healthy downstream ripple effect across the local ecosystem.”
According to Doncaster, this has been the largest program investment to date.
“Driving profitability across the full customer life cycle, beyond just the initial transaction, is what we’ve designed the entire framework around,” she said.
“As an example, our new powered by Nutanix: verified services program enables eligible partners to turn their delivery capabilities into recognised, branded practices while simultaneously unlocking earned business development funds.
“The program also includes healthy incentives for on-time renewal execution, rewarding partners who stay close to their customers with predictable, high-margin recurring revenue.”
Doncaster noted the changes have been designed around a particular shift that have been happening in the channel market.
“Partners are increasingly looking to achieve materially healthier blended margins by wrapping their own services around a vendor’s platform,” she said.
Another change Doncaster sees is partners are looking for support around agentic AI and understanding what it means for them, their businesses, and their customers’ businesses.
“The partners seeing real commercial traction locally are the ones who can demystify the infrastructure foundations required for agentic AI and give enterprise customers a secure, predictable launchpad to operationalise their AI strategy,” she ended.