What are the solutions Nutanix is rolling out for the Indian market in line with Smart Cities and Digital Transformation?
 
 Big Data will drive the cities of tomorrow. As India’s cities become busier and more congested they will put even greater stress on resources. Managing those resources will be the difference between a thriving and a struggling metropolis.  The cities will also be a magnet for data – data of every sort, and from every source.

India’s digital strategy is looking to provide an integrated ecosystem with open technology architecture that has a data-centric approach - allowing decision-makers to take data-based decisions without ‘gut-feelings’. 

The only way to manage the complexity of cities of the future will be to ensure that all the city’s resources are managed from a central plane – an infrastructure specifically built to handle the vast quantity, sources, and variety of the data it is being asked to coordinate and manage. And one that grows as the data grows.

For a country with the scale of India, ironically, the ability for a scalable, adaptive architecture that allows for easy management today and in the future is critical. For government departments across the country, Nutanix has rolled out affordable, easy-to-access solutions, helping them make the transition to efficient and virtualized datacentres and cloud. 

These solutions let local departments break down silos with the help of a single platform that can run any application and any cloud, and offers departments better management and better coordination to achieve their full potential.
 
 The foundation of Smart Cities will be a smart infrastructure to deliver better services within budget while diverting resources to the front line. This shift from legacy systems and a hardware India to software India is the first step to achieving a modern infrastructure that is built for today and for the future.

Can you tell us about Nutanix’s involvement in Government projects?
 
 As governments look to develop an infrastructure that is capable of managing cluttered, complex and congested cities, they’re looking for easy-to-manage tech solutions that are workable today and scalable for tomorrow. Ideally, these solutions should underpin the entire city- with mass urbanization, today’s challenges of congestion and clutter are likely to become more complicated, and what these cities require is a simple underlying infrastructure that can accommodate such complexity. Nutanix is working with government departments to achieve this goal.
 
 We continue to witness a strong trend towards digitization in the Government and Public Sector. We have supported and will continue to support the metropolitan and federal governments as they invest in the infrastructure to advance our digital economy. We currently have multiple government customers in tier 1 and tier  cities as well as multiple public sector organizations ready for a digital future.

What are your strategies and plans for further expansion in lines with enterprise business and Government business?
 
 Nutanix will continue to support the Government of India with the latest software-driven technologies to ensure that India’s enterprises and cities maintain their strong economic and technological leadership. 

What are the challenges faced in the Indian market scenario and what are the methods of mitigation?
 
 Exploring and exploiting new technologies, like automation and business intelligence, to help ignite India’s digital economy is already a core element of the country’s businesses. As adoption gathers pace the impact on how the businesses operates and how they fund themselves will undergo radical change.  Technology is moving so fast that the ability to keep up and adapt in real time is becoming a core survival skill for enterprises – and how to pay for them just as important. 

The good news is that staying up to date with the latest technologies is getting easier and more affordable. Hardware is increasingly being commoditised. The true value being in the software and applications on the platform. As the future will undoubtedly be software led, the way we fund our technology adoption will become more flexible and available, and the need for large capex purchases will disappear. Subscription models will become the norm – as companies adopt new technologies and infrastructure at fraction of the purchase price and simply license the software.
 
 The speed of development often outpaces regulation, as is often the case with technology, and one of the potential challenges would be that some cities in India would be able to faster adopt digitization than others. However, more countries around the world are looking to global governance to share in the potential of new technologies – recently 42 OECD countries, including India, agreed to support a global AI governance framework.  The signatories acknowledged AI as an essential tool to drive economic growth, empower workers, and lift up quality of life for all.

How will 5G be leveraged in the Indian market and will it change how telcos earn revenue?
 
 The use of 5G networks will drive a fresh round of cloud transformation and use of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) across India. With legacy three-tier architectures already struggling under the task of managing high volumes of data generated by today’s enterprises, 5G is likely to drive edge computing and IoT. As increased speed and bandwidth reduce the gap between wifi and cellular devices – edge computing will come into a realm of its own.

Spurred on by 5G networks, this shift of computing to the edge will drive more opportunities for India’s businesses to take advantage of the multiple benefits of cloud and HCI to deal with the issue of data gravity, enabling a better, more efficient allocation of resources.
 
 As 5G cuts service provider operating costs, they will transform from “pipe”  deliverers. Telcos will also potentially work more closely with OEMs, content providers, and vendors to deploy their 5G services effectively to customers or indeed transform themselves into value added services providers.

Can you tell us about Nutanix’s partnership with HPE and the way forward?
 
 The HPE and Nutanix partnership delivers an integrated hybrid cloud as a Service (aaS) solution. This offering leverages Nutanix’s license-free AHV hypervisor and Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software, delivered through HPE GreenLake, to provide customers with a fully managed solution that dramatically lowers total cost of ownership and accelerates operational productivity. The HPE-Nutanix partnership is designed to expand choices to customers for each company’s offering. HPE’s GreenLake strategy is to lead the market, delivering a broad set of aaS offerings leveraging HPE solutions and through a broad ecosystem of partners. Our strategy is to provide its customers with a range of consumption models, including a pay-as-you-go service (via HPE GreenLake), and the freedom to run Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software across a range of popular third-party server platforms.
 
 We are already seeing high levels of excitement and interest from local customers and partners now that Nutanix is available on HPE ProLiant DX. Businesses understand that their technology infrastructure is no longer fit for purpose and cannot simply be ‘patched’ or tinkered with. DX provides them with the means to modernise their datacentre on their terms: with the hardware and software platform of their choice.