Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing, today announced the second generation of its Elevate Technology Alliance Partner Program, delivering new benefits, “Nutanix Ready” technical designs, and marketing and enablement investments to enable further growth of the partner ecosystem supporting Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.

In just over a year since its launch at the 2015 .NEXT Conference, the Nutanix Elevate program has grown to include 50 technology alliance partnerships, with over 100 partner solutions to date verified as Nutanix Ready.

At the inaugural Nutanix Elevate Alliances Summit during the .NEXT Conference earlier this month, Nutanix previewed this next-generation program with partners, which now includes these enhanced features and benefits:

• Enhanced Education and Enablement - Improvements to field and channel education and enablement better enable partners to sell joint solutions.
• Joint Messaging and Solution Development - Elevate partners will now work directly with the Nutanix team to develop customer messaging and solution verifications for joint initiatives.
• Co-marketing and Go-to-market - Through focused co-marketing tools, POC environments which showcase joint solutions and exclusive roadmap and business reviews with Nutanix executives, technical teams and business owners, Elevate partners now have far greater support to deliver joint solutions to customers.

The technology companies within the Elevate Partner Program are innovation leaders across numerous market categories -- including desktop and application virtualization, cloud, security, networking, data protection, infrastructure management, and application development -- and hold tens of thousands of patents.

In addition to being able to attain “Nutanix Ready: Core” designation by meeting the criteria necessary to demonstrate interoperability with the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform, Elevate partners can now earn two new technical designations which provide customers with assurance that their solutions are compatible with Nutanix technology:

• Nutanix Ready: AHV-- for solutions that work with Nutanix’s built-in virtualization solution
• Nutanix Ready: Integrated-- for leveraging Nutanix APIs to enrich management or delivering unique features

“A strong partner ecosystem is key to strengthening access and opportunities for customers to leverage the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform and that’s why we focus so heavily on our joint investments,” said Venugopal Pai, Vice President of Alliances and Business Development at Nutanix. “We actively work with our Elevate partners on a range of activities including marketing events, and with these updates, we are investing even further in enabling field collaboration, channel programs, and demand-generation to drive incomparable value for our Elevate partners, resulting in better results for our joint customers.”

“Through our alliance partnership with Nutanix, we’re able to deliver end-to-end solutions that deliver an enterprise level experience at an affordable price point,” said Steve Blacklock, Vice President, Global Strategic Alliances at Citrix. “We’re getting great feedback from our channel partners and customers on our joint solutions -- such as the recently announced Nutanix InstantON VDI for Citrix offerings -- and we look forward to continuing to enable broader adoption of enterprise cloud platforms together.”

“As a leader six years in a row in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Software, we believe our growing partnership and close engineering relationship with Nutanix will be instrumental to our continued success,” said Brian Allison, Vice President of Worldwide Alliances, Channel at Commvault. “We are proud to have unveiled a powerful solution for the channel that combines our modernized data protection approach with the hypervisor flexibility and portability of Nutanix appliances to allow partners to provide an end-to-end solution and services to help mutual customers migrate from legacy hardware.”

Existing Elevate partners will receive updated program materials over the coming weeks, allowing them to take advantage of the new program benefits and requirements. Technology vendors who would like to join the Elevate program are invited to contact Nutanix at alliances@nutanix.com.