Organizations need help building modern application stacks, connecting siloed stakeholders, achieving regulatory compliance, and meeting sustainability goals. This presents great opportunities for Nutanix and its ecosystem partners.

Application modernization remains one of the key initiatives for enterprises across different industries. Organizations are driven by the need to deliver differentiated, high-value digital experiences for customers, and many of them must face the reality that their current legacy application portfolio and infrastructure cannot support their business goals. Therefore, the need to modernize, creating cloud-native solutions powered by containerized applications, that can run in the public, private, or hybrid cloud.

Beyond re-platforming, re-architecting, re-hosting, and migrating apps – which are typical actions that organizations take as part of their modernization process – there are a number of key areas where Nutanix and our partner ecosystem can help customers get the most out of their modernization investment.

1. Develop fully integrated solutions – Application modernization is a complex process, and it cannot be enabled by a single technology. Rather, organizations must bring together a variety of technologies – including hardware, infrastructure, and applications – and it is often impossible to get everything needed from one vendor. Certain applications will have latency sensitivities that require specialized networking gear, for instance, and others will have particular storage requirements. Programs such as Nutanix’s partnership with Red Hat, which provides customers with a full-stack platform to build, scale, and manage containerized and virtualized cloud-native applications in a hybrid multi cloud environment, enables partners to be part of customers effort to build a modern application stack, bringing together cost-effective and best-of-breed tools that will help them achieve their business goals, in a unified environment.
2. Involve Development Teams – Traditionally, it’s been very rare for vendor or partner sales teams to have direct contact with both the software development and infrastructure teams within organizations. The main rationale for that was a clear delineation between their responsibilities, underscored by the assumption that the infrastructure team could make all their decisions based on a static view of the workloads that they had to run. In the age of monolithic, slow-evolving applications this held largely true, but in a world where agility and speed of delivery are key business imperatives, infrastructure decisions are increasingly impacted by the type of workloads that will be running on them, and software development teams should now have a seat at the table as organizations modernize. Conversely, software development teams can help the decision by choosing components that are best aligned with the target infrastructure. The strength of Nutanix ecosystem is that it enables partners to be part of a decision process that involves all the stakeholders, including development teams, ensuring that organizations choose the best solution, which sets them up for long term success.
3. Achieve Regulatory Compliance – Regulations are having a growing impact on how organizations design their infrastructure and application portfolio. For instance, the European Union has published a legislative proposal for a regulation known as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (or “DORA”). The regulation, aimed at mitigating cyber risk in the financial services sector, would require any application supplier to have business continuity plans and contingencies in place in case of disruptions on the part of their public cloud environments. Similar regulations are being considered in the United States, as well. For customers, these regulations may mean new requirements around building private clouds for redundancy and easing the migration of critical workloads. Partners take advantage of Nutanix hybrid multi-cloud capabilities to help their customers to stay abreast of – and to remain regulation compliant.
4. Meet Sustainability Goals – Energy efficiency and environmental sustainability are becoming more and more important to organizations’ bottom lines – and to their reputation. Increasingly, emerging technologies consume large amounts of power. We’re already seeing this with technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and high-performance computing (HPC). With the “metaverse” spurring organizations across industries to develop compute-intensive virtual reality (VR) applications, this issue is only going to grow in the coming years. According to published studies, as of 2018, the world’s data centers alone accounted for 1 percent of the electric energy consumed worldwide. This drives up operating costs for organizations, but also has a significant impact on their environmental footprint. This comes at a time when consumers are more sensitive to the sustainability of the companies they patronize, and investors are increasingly monitoring the environmental, social and governance (ESG) impact of businesses, supported by more stringent regulatory requirements on ESG reporting. Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) enables a consumption-based approach to IT, preventing the over-provisioning of capacity that leads to wastage. Working with Nutanix, partners can help organizations to build tech solutions that lessen their environmental footprints and keep their energy consumption in check.