Nutanix refines product set to capture low-hanging fruit in SMB space. Logical enough if all IT can... [+]
Selling cloud power targeted for Small to Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs) so that they can go ‘enterprise-level web-scale’ is the new black. Well, more specifically, SMBs are the new low hanging fruit if you are a cloud vendor who has come to market with an enterprise-focused service or technology component that now wants to reap the profits resting in the smaller firm sector.
A spot-changing-leopard?
This spot-changing-leopard approach is not uncommon across the IT space, or indeed within any industry. It’s fair enough in a sense i.e. why not ‘perfect’ your customer proposition to one sector and then diversify or tweak your product set and price points to broaden your appeal. That’s just simple economics isn’t it?
Simple economics or not, the market tends to nervously prickle slightly when vendors try to shift focus in this manner.
A case in point being Nutanix with its new Xpress product aligned to an SMB focus. As Forbes writer Justin Warren writes here, other vendors like Scale Computing and others have been more consistent than Nutanix about their SMB marketing from the start.
So is it unfair to castigate Nutanix for trying to position Xpress as microwavable instant low calorie SMB hyperconvergence? In a sense, this is what hyperconvergence is supposed to be all about anyway i.e. storage, compute, networking and virtualization all optimized together in a single hardware appliance. Just right for SMBs who need an all in one solution, surely?
Just add water… and one IT pro
Nutanix Xpress is supposedly so ‘easy’ to use that a single IT professional can install and manage an organization’s entire IT infrastructure with it.
Nutanix attempts to justify its product developments by saying that larger companies can tackle IT upgrade challenges by reshaping their datacenter infrastructure. Smaller organizations, however, are often unable to make such drastic shifts due to imposing costs and training requirements. Without access to more affordable and simpler solutions, SMBs continue to fall further behind, unable to compete as effectively with large corporations.
“A medium-sized business, such as a regional manufacturer or law firm, typically has a small team of IT generalists responsible for all technology services within their company, including managing the disparate, specialised and complex technologies around virtualization, server, storage and backup infrastructure. The team’s IT director struggles to drive the business forward when faced with balancing flat budgets and critical infrastructure challenges,” said the company, in a press statement.
A plug and play cloud
This is hyperconverged offering that can power 5 to 500 virtual machines (VMs). All software is factory preinstalled and ready to run nearly any virtualised application for small and medium businesses in less than 60 minutes. The firm says that built-in Nutanix AHV hypervisor and VM management can eliminate virtualization licensing costs and there are no additional software components to install and manage
“This is a new Nutanix product line with a dedicated technology roadmap. In support of this new initiative, Nutanix is building new gotomarket strategies with its channel, developing additional training and augmenting its worldclass support organization,” said Raja Mukhopadhyay, VP of product management, Nutanix.
What to think next
This is a tough one. Nutanix has shown impressive growth and was a name that none of us even knew half a decade ago. On the other hand, the firm has a certain roguish impetuousness and it was probably wasn’t aiming for ‘subtle and understated’ now anyway was it?
Let’s remember that everything in computing can be served into compartmentalized containerized components with optimized automation. What size you serve those chunks depends upon who’s coming to dinner -- and how hungry they are.
