Cisco and Nutanix: A 360-Degree Partnership Where 1 + 1 = 3

Cisco enters strategic partnerships like the one with Nutanix in order to leverage our strengths in data center infrastructure with the complementary strengths of industry leaders. It’s a “1 + 1 = 3” approach that provides our customers with more comprehensive and optimized solutions in the face of evolving challenges.

According to IDC, the number of new applications that are expected to be available by 2026 is 750 million. Apps today are the foundation for transforming traditional business models into digital-first models, and they act as the key interface between businesses and their customers, their technology partners, their supply chain, and their employees. A recent Gartner report states that 50% of enterprise data will be created and processed outside of centralized data centers and clouds by 2025. Gartner also predicts a 75% edge computing growth rate by 2025.

In other words, IT (and specifically computing) is becoming more hyper-distributed in nature, which requires new and innovative approaches to infrastructure deployment, management, and operations to meet the demands of our hybrid multicloud world.

This was both the challenge and opportunity that Cisco and Nutanix took on in our global strategic partnership that we announced last year. In this blog, I’ll go a level deeper to provide a progress report and to highlight the truly unique aspects of this partnership.

What 360-degree partnership means

What sets the Cisco and Nutanix partnership apart from traditional resell agreements is the depth and scope of the engagements between our two companies. The partnership involves virtually every facet of our joint business model spanning strategy, engineering, support/services, and go-to-market. I think Jeremy Foster’s blog covered the strategy aspect pretty well, so I’ll focus on the differentiated aspects of engineering, support, and go-to-market.

Engineering: The partnership enables Cisco and Nutanix engineers to leverage the innovation strengths of both companies so that we can deliver a seamless end-to-end customer experience. The two companies are building deep product-level integrations that span across our production portfolios. We are also jointly developing roadmaps that address key customer requirements including unifying management, modernizing infrastructure, and simplifying operations to support virtually any application across the hybrid multicloud. The outcome is a complete end-to-end hyperconverged solution that is fully integrated and validated using best-of-breed Cisco servers, networking, and SaaS operations with Nutanix’s cloud-based capabilities in infrastructure, management, storage, and end-user computing.

Here are two recent engineering successes:

• Through the deep integration and co-engineering efforts between the Cisco Intersight and Nutanix Prism teams, we have made the Cisco Intersight Standalone Mode for Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix orderable for customers. This solution is designed to provide customers maximum flexibility in customizing their HCI solution to their environment. Specifically, customers can choose between the existing fully integrated network experience with UCS Fabric Interconnects or the new capability to deploy their own network fabric. This solution also enables customers to deploy hyperconverged clusters at scale by leveraging the automation capabilities available in the Cisco Intersight and Nutanix Prism Central integration. And we enable new edge use cases by being able to deploy 1- or 2-node clusters with lower TCO and with the flexibility of using Cisco or third-party host adapters.
• Through standardized, open APIs, the Cisco and Nutanix HCI solution is extensible to a wide range of use cases important to customers such as security and data protection. An example is our support of the Cohesity Data Cloud for Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix that provides capabilities such as backup and recovery, disaster recovery, cyber vaulting, and automated ransomware recovery at the edge, data centers, and multicloud environments.

Support and Services: A major differentiator of the Cisco and Nutanix partnership is our joint augmented support model built for information-sharing and to deliver the best possible unified experience for customers. We go far beyond the limitations of traditional joint support agreements. Customers in need of support can ask either Cisco or Nutanix support teams, who are fully empowered and function as a joint case management team to route any issue to the expert(s) who can best solve that problem as quickly as possible. We monitor key metrics such as mean time to resolution (MTTR) and make continual improvements to ensure that we’re delivering on this as promised. Our goal is to help maintain Nutanix’s enviable net promoter score, which is a clear indication of how well we’re doing in delighting our customers.

Go-to-Market: Perhaps no aspect of the partnership better exemplifies the “1 + 1 = 3” model than our approach to go-to-market (GTM), which includes direct and indirect sales. The GTM teams for this solution work together as one, as in we treat the Nutanix products like they were our own. Our collaborative customer engagement model leverages Cisco’s strengths with a diverse set of buying programs—including financing options that simplify the experience, from procurement to fulfillment, whether it’s directly from us or our channel partners. Cisco prides itself on making it easy to do business with us. We’re delivering that benefit and more through this partnership.

See you at Nutanix .NEXT

The Cisco Compute team will be in full force at Nutanix .NEXT 2024, May 21–23, in Barcelona. We and our partners at Nutanix will be showcasing the innovations and go-to-market programs that accelerate customers’ hybrid multicloud adoption, foster innovation, and provide seamless customer experience through complete simplicity, flexibility, and resiliency. We will also publish a more technical blog that will highlight new innovations from this partnership and how we are delivering on the full potential of our 360-degree partnership before the event.

You can find more information for the Cohesity Data Cloud for Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix in this solution brief.

When registering for Nutanix .NEXT, please use the code NEXT-CISCO40 to receive a 40% discount.

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