Nutanix’s New FastTrack Offer Promises VDI ‘In Days, Not Months’

With Nutanix’s new FastTrack for VDI offering, channel partners receive assistance for rapid VDI deployment, pre-built configurations, estimated delivery times and enhanced channel incentives.

As businesses across the globe are scrambling to accommodate a new at-home workforce, Nutanix is helping channel partners meet their urgent needs by launching FastTrack for VDI. The new offer enables a channel partner to create a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment in days, not months, for customers combating the coronavirus pandemic, said Nutanix’s channel chief Christian Alvarez.

“We’re making an easy button for VDI,” said Alvarez, vice president of Americas channel, OEM and distribution at Nutanix in an interview with CRN. “We’re seeing deployments can be within days based on certain scenarios and the customers environment.”

The San Jose, Calif.-based company is providing partners with assistance for rapid VDI deployment, simplified pre-built configurations, estimated delivery dates and enhanced channel incentives that not only gives rebates to the solution provider as a company, but individual sales reps and engineers as well.

Nutanix FastTrack for VDI is a predefined combination of software, hardware and service delivery option to onboard thousands of remote employees in record time. The offer includes services to set up and provision desktops in under five days for predefined Nutanix configurations, providing businesses with secure access to business applications and desktops. FastTrack is VDI compatible for Nutanix, VMware Horizon and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.

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Customers will be able to select predefined Nutanix hardware to be delivered in ten to 15 days in the U.S. or leverage existing hardware as well as the option to managed cloud infrastructure from MSPs. To support expedited delivery of virtual apps and desktop solutions, Nutanix has predefined hardware configurations that are sized by Nutanix VDI specialists for all deployment sizes.

“Obviously our VDI solutions, like all Nutanix solutions, work with our awesome hardware partners like HPE, Lenovo and others,” said Alvarez. “Around deployment, which is very critical today, the partners have access to Nutanix services. So we’re providing assistance for rapid deployment. We’re able to leverage deployments in days, not months.”

Al Solorzano, vice president, end user computing at Concord, Calif.-based Entisys360, hailed the new FastTrack offering as an answer customers are looking for in order to stay afloat during the coronavirus pandemic which is forcing business to adopt work from home strategies.

“Trying to stay in business is what every single one of our customers is trying to deal with today. The faster that they can provide the scale of their work at home initiatives, the better. Nutanix’s FastTrack is an easy fit,” said Solorzano. “Nutanix is easy to deploy, easy scale-out and a quick return on customer investment. FastTrack has preconfigured solutions from Nutanix so it’s very easy to identify workloads and come out with quotes as compared to other competitors where it’s a multi-day, multi-week configuration to figure out which exactly is going to make the most sense. Having this FastTrack program, some guaranteed delivery dates and preconfigured solutions – it’s going to make it a lot easier for our customers.”

Entisys360 is one of the top VDI solution providers in the country and is a CRN Triple Crown award winner. Solorzano said initial discussions with customers over the past 30 days dealing with the coronavirus pandemic were around making sure they leverage the IT they already own and figure out how to scale it. Customers are now seeking different solutions to fit into their new work at home strategy.

“Maybe their current hardware provider is not scaling as much as they thought. Maybe there’s not as much available hardware from that particular provider or there’s just complexity to the solution they already have with a traditional three-tier architecture. So having something like Nutanix with their hyperconverged, easy return on investment, quick to deploy model – it’s definitely something a lot of our customers are thinking about,” said Solorzano. “The ones that haven’t gone to Nutanix in the past are now looking at hyperconverged Nutanix solutions as a way to change their business model and provide that scale they need to have for their on-premises deployments.”

Nutanix partners who participate in FastTrack will received enhanced channel inventive such as individual rebates for sales reps and systems engineers.

“In FastTrack, we’ve expanded it to not just incentivize the partner, but also reward the individuals,” said Alvarez. “We’re incentivizing on the partner side based on certain variables.”

The company said VDI on Nutanix can cut deployment time by up to 92 percent and lets customers add new users, apps and services in minutes. Nutanix can also easily scale from hundreds to thousands of users and can significantly reduce total cost of ownership, according to Alvarez.

Solorzano said Nutanix is stepping up to the plate with FastTrack which shows its commitment in helping customers and partners in a time of great uncertainty.

“This is driving value and speed of return on investments for customers. So having pre-built configurations and an estimated delivery time, which is definitely a big interest for our customers today, is huge,” said Solorzano. “This is something we can to go market with to truly help our customers.”