'Hyper convergence is so 2013' - Nutanix EMEA channel boss

Jan Ursi claims Nutanix now sees public cloud providers as main competitors

Hyper-converged vendor Nutanix now sees public cloud giants Azure and AWS as its main competitors, according to EMEA director of channel Jan Ursi.

Founded in 2013 Nutanix is widely regarded as the market leader in hyper convergence and saw a successful IPO last year.

Speaking to CRN Ursi (pictured) claimed that Nutanix no longer sees other hyper-converged vendors as the competition and has now set its sights set on wresting market share from the public cloud providers.

"Hyper convergence is so 2013," he said. "It was the beginning of a new dynamic in the datacentre where you will remove complexity, but it was only the beginning.

"If you look at where we are - being the leader, having more than 50 per cent market share and so on - it's because we have moved beyond hyper converged for some years already.

"For us our competitors are already a long while not SimpliVity, our competitors are the public cloud providers."

Ursi explained that, with this in mind, Nutanix is pushing its enterprise cloud solution which aims to bring cloud-like functionality and performance to the datacentre - and already has relationships with AWS and Azure.

He said that while moving workloads to the cloud is relatively simple, end users are now realising the complexity and cost of moving things out of the cloud.

"We can help people have a warm and cosy feeling that they can move between public cloud and back again, and that's actually good for public cloud providers," he said.

"The success of public cloud has been immense and that's because they offer this value of making everything invisible to the customer so they can concentrate on things that matter, not on how many ways you can bend a fibre cable.

"Public cloud is also a victim of its own success where people are getting afraid of it. People sometimes get the bill and they are afraid to open it because [the providers] know that it is very hard, once you've moved [to the cloud], to get out again so in their pricing dynamics they will do everything they can to bump up the price.

"That is now starting to slow peoples' ease with putting things in the cloud."

Sam Routledge, CTO at Nutanix partner Softcat, explained that Nutanix's public cloud offering is gaining traction with end users who aren't yet fully comfortable with moving everything to the public cloud, but want the benefits of some of its functionality.

"I've always looked at hyper convergence as exactly that [an alternative to the cloud] because it changes the cost model," he said.

"You no longer need to buy 50 per cent more than you need. It's not quite pay as you go, but it is certainly pay as you grow.

"For organisations who are teetering about public cloud and are not entirely sure about it it brings a touch of cloud economics - not the whole thing - but something approaching it and that is why hyper convergence is so popular."