High-tech computing company Nutanix is looking to further grow its presence in the Sub-Saharan region through a channel-led strategy.
According to Paul Ruinaard, country manager for Nutanix Sub-Saharan Africa, the company is looking into major geographies and hubs where large data centres are running enterprise-class applications.
"These are typically Nigeria and Ghana in West Africa, Kenya and Tanzania in East Africa and then Mauritius in the Indian Ocean Islands. The SADC countries are also a natural fit as they are close to South Africa and very accessible."
The company says the South African team is working closely with partners to enable extensive channel activities, including training and joint promotions, in order to develop premier partners' skills for the region. Ruinaard says Nutanix will go to market with original equipment manufacturers initially and partner with their channel to create coverage and demand.
The company is already doing business in Kenya and Mauritius and is experiencing growing demand in Nigeria, he adds.
"Africa is a vast region with many opportunities. Each region has unique challenges so each one has to have a clear defined strategy - you cannot apply the same thinking in SADC [Southern African Development Community] as you would in Mauritius, as Mauritius is much more advanced a market with fewer constraints.
Ruinaard said just like in South Africa, the company plans to grow a technically solid and loyal following of Nutanix in the Sub-Saharan region.
"In short, it will be a channel-led strategy supported by in country partnerships. We will likely look to bring on dedicated account management in the future to cover the region. Partners are the key to Nutanix growth and success and having the ability to support the products in country is very important."
Ruinaard said Nutanix started operating in SA two and half years ago with just three employees and now it has up to nine. The company says it has doubled its team size and has enjoyed more than 130% growth in total customers in the past financial year.
Nutanix attributes the rapid growth to its ability to deliver relevant technology that helps companies.
"With hyper-convergence infrastructure as the building block for the future data centre, we enable customers to simplify their IT operations, providing choices in hardware, hypervisor and cloud platforms, through a software-driven approach.
"All of these translate into a goal, whereby we aim to make infrastructure invisible, allowing IT professionals to focus on delivering value-added business applications and services rather than keeping the data centre lights on."
Ruinaard says the company is placing a lot of emphasis on expanding its local technical expertise and it currently hosts quarterly engineer specific events that attract more than 100 engineers per event.
Nutanix recently hosted a hackathon where teams from partners and customers set out to build innovative solutions on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software, he added.
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