“That’s what the big thrill is about this announcement, that Omnissa is looking at it and saying, ‘Hey, maybe [VMware] ESX isn’t the lone place to be running. Maybe we should be running on another hypervisor? Specifically on AHV,’” Nutanix’s global channel chief, Dave Gwyn, tells CRN.
Nutanix’s new partnership with VMware’s end-user computing (EUC) spinoff company Omnissa will enable VMware-Broadcom customers to now easily ditch VMware’s ESX hypervisor for Nutanix’s AHV hypervisor.
“Naturally, as a VMware spinoff, Omnissa was running on top of the VMware hypervisor, which is ESX,” Nutanix Global Channel Chief Dave Gwyn (pictured) told CRN in an interview.
“That’s what the big thrill is about this announcement, that Omnissa is looking at it and saying, ‘Hey, maybe ESX isn’t the lone place to be running. Maybe we should be running on another hypervisor? Specifically on AHV,’” he said.
[Related: Toshiba Ditches VMware For Nutanix; Nutanix CEO Explains How Company Is Winning New Customers]
Gwyn said the new collaboration gives channel partners and Omnissa customers “the flexibility to deploy with customers who may be somewhat disenchanted with the current Broadcom experience.”
On top of that, Nutanix has launched a slew of new partnerships with hardware vendors including Pure Storage that enable Broadcom-VMware customers to more easily move off VMware completely.
“Why are we partnering with so many different companies that you would have never thought we would have partnered with before?” said Gwyn, senior vice president of worldwide channels and customer success. “What changed is the market conditions and the Broadcom acquisition of VMware.
“There’s a lot of customers out there who have Pure Storage but don’t want to be using ESX as their underlying hypervisor. They don’t want to be deployed on VMware. So what’s their alternative? Well, now Nutanix is,” he said. “That’s the same for the Omnissa story. Now customers can say, ‘OK, we can now move over to AHV.”
Nutanix Partner XenTegra: Omnissa Partnership ‘Is Huge’
This week at the Nutanix Next 2025 conference in Washington, D.C., Nutanix unveiled a partnership that brings Omnissa Horizon to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. In March, Omnissa launched a new partner program.
Omnissa’s new collaboration with Nutanix gives businesses more choice in how and where they run virtual desktops and applications—extending Horizon support from public cloud environments to modern on-premises deployments. With Omnissa Horizon running on Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure with AHV, customers can deploy virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) in their on-premises data centers, in private clouds and across public cloud providers while managing it all through a unified platform that provides control.
Les Roche, CRO at Nutanix partner XenTegra, said the Omnissa partnership “is huge” for Nutanix and its channel partners.
“Our expertise is around EUC and VDI, so this is definitely giving customers more choice and more options in that space,” said Roche. “We’re leading with Nutanix.”
Omnissa Nutanix Partnership Might Boost Citrix Churn
XenTegra is also a Citrix partner. With Citrix being acquired by private equity firms, some customers might now turn to the new alternative solution of Omnissa Horizon on Nutanix AHV.
“There’s also some churn out there in the marketplace with Citrix having gone private. Every once in a while, we run into a customer that wants choice. They want to look at another option,” said Roche.
“We never had a giant VMware business, so we weren’t as big on the Horizon side. But now that you know they can run Horizon on AHV—it’s all about giving our customers more choice and more options,” he said.
Nutanix’s New Pure Storage And Dell Technologies Partnerships
Some of the biggest news at Nutanix Next this week was the San Jose, Calif.-based hyperconverged superstar unveiling a partnership with Pure Storage.
Nutanix’s Cloud Infrastructure, powered by Nutanix AHV and its Flow virtual networking and security, will integrate with Pure Storage FlashArray to deliver a customer experience designed for high-demand data workloads, including AI.
In addition, Nutanix formed a partnership with Dell Technologies last year around hardware products and a joint go-to-market channel strategy. The companies have been doubling down on the partnership, recently unveiling the general availability of Dell’s PowerFlex software-defined storage on the Nutanix Cloud Platform.
“In the data center space, you’ve got so many customers that are so heavily invested in the Dell platform or the Pure platform. Now they don’t have to make a choice of that or Nutanix,” said Roche. “They can get the best of both worlds, especially for those looking to move away from Broadcom.”
