Nutanix is overhauling its flagship Elevate Partner Program with new rebates, incentives and AI tools aimed at helping partners drive higher profits through cross-selling, services and renewals. Nutanix Channel Chief Christian Goffi takes a deep dive with CRN.
Nutanix is revamping its flagship Elevate Partner Program with new incentives, rebates and AI tools to drive partner profitability around cross-selling, life-cycle services and renewal efficiency.
The $3 billion San Jose, Calif.-based company is launching a new Business Development Fund for partners, creating an AI-powered telemetry tool called Deal Coach and providing more margins for selling products—such as Nutanix AI and Kubernetes platforms—into existing customer accounts.
“The amount of dollars that are being dedicated to the program [in fiscal year 2027] is the largest we’ve ever done before,” Christian Goffi, vice president of Americas ecosystem sales, told CRN.
In an interview with CRN, Goffi takes a deep dive into the new enhancements to the Nutanix Elevate Partner Program and the company’s goal of driving partner profitability in the AI era.
Nutanix partners can now earn new rebates if they cross-sell more of the portfolio like Kubernetes, database and Nutanix Enterprise AI. Talk about how partners can make more money here.
Cross-selling the full stack is really what we’re talking about here.
Our partners have done a great job of positioning our core offering. We were primarily a hyperconverged company that has grown into cloud management and now into being a platform for AI workloads.
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But the better we do at increasing our breadth with the different products that we have, the more sticky our partners can become in managing that customer accordingly.
So we’ve introduced some specific rebates that have to do with our portfolio products.
So whether it’s database management, which is our NDB platform, or our NKP Kubernetes platform and NAI AI platform, as well as NUS for unified storage—all of these things are our portfolio products. We’re paying specific rebates to partners for that expansion into customers.
So even if it’s an existing account, but we’re expanding with portfolio products, we want to make sure that they’re lit up and incentivized to do that.
Nutanix says fiscal year 2027 marks the company’s largest investment to date in the Elevate program. Talk about that.
It’s largely a budgetary commentary. It’s about how much of our business are we reinvesting back into the channel community.
So the amount of dollars that are being dedicated to the program is the largest we’ve ever done before. And it’s being manifested into things like us introducing something called earned BDF [Business Development Funds], which is a predictable stream.
Explain what Nutanix’s new Business Development Funds for partners are.
It’s 1 percent of your TCV [total contract value] sales, and it’s applicable for all of our top-tier partners. Our premier-level partners are now going to benefit from an earned BDF.
And it’s on top of all the benefits that they already had before. So this wasn’t shifting funds from one side of the program to the other. So that’s an example of an increment that we’ve done.
Partners have always asked about, ‘If I knew how much that rebate was going to be, I would be better at planning demand generation campaigns and things to grow your brand. But since it’s always up and down and based on performance, I’m not able to do that.’
So what we did was keep our up-and-down rebate mechanism that is based on performance, but we overlaid it with this earned BDF that now gives them consistent inflow of money that can be used to grow the business. So that’s something that the partners are really excited about too.
Nutanix plans to launch AI-powered tools like Deal Coach. Explain Deal Coach and any other AI that partners can now leverage.
We’re going to do a better job of providing telemetry to partners.
Deal Coach is an AI mechanism that takes the telemetry data, gives it context, and provides that enablement in real time to a partner.
So it’s about understanding the customer environments, understanding which are the top questions I need to ask when I go to that customer meeting. How do I explore the future? How do I know it’s being properly utilized? It’s really about pushing all that intelligence right in front of them.
We’re expecting to launch Deal Coach in the second half of our fiscal year. It’s something that we’re very ,very excited about.
Why should partners be pumped about Deal Coach?
We want partners to be able to see what we see as far as the customer environment. Because that gives the partner cues on: Is this being underutilized? Is this being properly utilized? Which leads to customer satisfaction at the end of the day.
So for us to be able to provide that kind of visibility with Deal Coach is going to give tools for the partner to be able to do a better job in that sense.
In the old days, if you needed to know, ‘How do I position Nutanix? Or how do you compare to the competition? Or how do I approach this customer to talk about your value?’ Partners were dependent on Nutanix having to tell you everything. We would have to show up and show you a PowerPoint deck and walk you through the content and hope that you retain it and then come back and do it again.
AI has really transformed the way we all work, and Deal Coach is one of those examples.
What are the biggest changes and financial rewards you’re pushing with this revamped Elevate program that every Nutanix partner needs to know?
We still need partners to focus on landing accounts, but a big push here is around life-cycle management.
So what happens after landing an account is becoming increasingly more important. So our partner program has been adjusted to do things like ‘What happens after we close a deal?’
So now we’re incentivizing more of the pieces that have to do with life-cycle management.
So expansion into other portfolio products are more important from a profitability and program perspective.
We’re keeping a closer eye on things like renewal rates. That’s important. The sign of doing everything else right is whenever you’ve got a healthy renewal rate, and partners are a huge part of that.
If I had to use a housing analogy, it’s almost like before we would incentivize quite a bit on selling a house. Now, we’re focusing a lot on being a property manager. Help us with maintaining the house; if something breaks, you fix it. Making sure it looks nice. I’m using that metaphorically, but that’s essentially the leap we’re making as a partner program.
What’s another big component?
Another big component is around services.
The more we creep into the AI world, the more we realize that the partners’ competencies are super important, not just for Nutanix but for all vendors. So we continue to put emphasis in our partner program toward services readiness.
In light of remaining true to our partner-first mentality, we want the partners to lead with their services. We want them to make money-making services, but we also need them to be highly evolved in their services capabilities.
Nutanix has had systems integrators as part of the Elevate program before, but now you’re making the program even more transparent for them. Can you explain what you’re doing for global SIs?
Systems integrators have always been a player for us, but now we’re bringing them into the tent formally as part of the Elevate program.
So it’s been a little bit less structured and unofficial in the way that we would deal with global SIs.
Largely because, at least in the Americas, these SIs usually don’t hold the paper for a transaction.
They’re influential, but they’re not in the paper trail.
So whenever that happens, it’s difficult to create incentives and things when you’re not in the paper trail. So we found a way of getting more into the incentives for those influential places.
We see the GSI playing a big role in the AI evolution and in making sure that Nutanix is part of that blueprint.
We want to make sure that we bring them into the tent and for them to feel like they’re part of the framework.
Anything new in the program around renewals?
We’re introducing gates and tier acceleration that are related to renewal efficiency.
So if we do the right things in the process, and the result is a customer that is happy and a customer that renews mutually with both of us—we want to incentivize that.
So that’s an avenue to gain even more traction and more profitability with Nutanix.
Why is that renewal important for Nutanix?
Because historically our program has been so focused on landing accounts that we felt that we needed to also incentivize what happens next.
And going straight to renewal and just looking at that as a stand-alone thing wasn’t enough.
So that’s why we looked at the cross-selling of the portfolio, the adoption rate, providing better telemetry to understand the customer environment, which is something else that we’re doing. So that’s something very specifically tied to the renewal efficiency and incentivizing them.
Is there anything specific to VMware in the revamped program?
Not necessarily.
Partner friendliness has been part of our DNA. These are the things that keep us moving forward.
Our focus is more on, ‘How do we keep innovating with more things to give to the partners to go win?’
What Broadcom does is for really for Broadcom to decide. But what’s worked best for us is really to focus on us and to just be obsessed about what the customer needs.
What’s your message to partners?
The Nutanix strategy is always going to be through the partner.
Our partner community is very loyal. Our partner community tends to be very happy with working with Nutanix, and it has to do with our transparency and our consistency.
We don’t always give the answers that they want in every case, but it’s always consistent and it’s always transparent. Partners seem to really appreciate that about us. So that part is something that we are continuing 1,000 percent.
