AI, Cloud Simplicity and Ecosystem Scale to Define Nutanix Channel Strategy in 2026

Shaista Ahmed, Director – Channel & Ecosystem – Middle East & Africa, Nutanix, says, Nutanix aims to turn accelerated AI adoption, hybrid multicloud simplification, and deeper ecosystem collaboration into profitable, outcome-driven growth across the Middle East and Africa, with a sharp focus on platform simplicity, partner scale, and long-term customer value.​

What opportunities do you foresee for 2026, and how do you plan to leverage them?
The biggest opportunities lie at the intersection of AI, cloud simplicity, and ecosystem-led growth.AI adoption will accelerate beyond experimentation into real-world production use cases. This creates an opportunity to help customers modernize infrastructure, operationalize AI, and extract value from data securely and at scale. At the same time, enterprises will continue to simplify complex hybrid and multicloud environments, prioritizing platforms that deliver flexibility, resilience, and cost control.

At Nutanix we also see strong opportunity in partner-led, outcome-driven engagement, where ecosystems play a critical role in reaching new markets and expanding deal size.We will leverage these opportunities by focusing on Nutanix one platform-led messaging that clearly ties technology to business outcomes, deepen partner and ecosystem collaboration through co-innovation and joint GTM motions, drive targeted engagement models such as ABM to address enterprise accounts & continue to maintain a strong focus on trust, Profitability, long-term commitment, and customer success.

What major challenges did you encounter this year, and how did you address them?
One of the major challenges was navigating market uncertainty and budget constraints, which made customers more cautious in their technology investments. We addressed this by shifting conversations from features to clear business outcomes, helping customers see tangible value, ROI, and long-term impact. Another challenge was managing complexity across hybrid and multicloud environments. We tackled this through stronger platform-led messaging, focused enablement, and closer collaboration with partners to simplify solutions for customers.

Can you elaborate on your strategic partnerships this year and plans for next year?
This year, our strategic partnerships focused on deepening ecosystem collaboration rather than simply expanding reach. We worked closely with key Partners, MSP’s distributors and alliance partners to drive joint go-to-market initiatives, targeted engagements such as ABMs. This allowed us to align on priority accounts, deliver integrated solutions, while staying focused on customer outcomes.

We also invested heavily in partner enablement, equipping partners with the skills, messaging, and tools needed to articulate our platform value, especially around hybrid multicloud , AI-ready infrastructure & Nutanix Kubernetes platform. Looking ahead to next year, our plans are to evolve these partnerships from transactional to transformational. We will focus on co-innovation, verticalized solutions, and deeper alignment with hyperscalers and strategic MSP’s. Our goal is to build a partner-first, outcome-driven ecosystem that accelerates growth, expands market presence, and delivers sustained value to customers and partners alike.

What will be your primary focus areas and strategic priorities for 2026?
We will continue to focus on the below key priorities:

• Platform simplicity and differentiation: Positioning a single, unified platform that delivers flexibility, resilience, and cost efficiency while supporting any workload, anywhere.
• Partner and ecosystem scale: Deepening strategic partnerships with Partners, MSP’S, Distributors, GSIs, and hyperscalers through joint GTM, co-innovation, and vertical solutions.
• Outcome-driven customer engagement: Expanding ABM and industry-focused motions to align solutions directly to business outcomes and measurable value.
• Trust, execution, and long-term value: Continuing to lead with reliability, security, and customer success to build enduring relationships.

Are there plans to explore new markets or introduce new products/applications in 2026?
We will continue to focus on high-potential markets across the Middle East and Africa. Our approach is to tightly align market expansion and product innovation with clear customer outcomes,ensuring every new market entry or solution delivers tangible value, faster time to impact, and long-term sustainability for both customers and partners.

How is your company approaching sustainability, digital transformation, or AI adoption in preparation for 2026?
We are focusing on reducing infrastructure complexity and energy consumption by promoting consolidate workloads and optimize resource utilization. By enabling customers to modernize and right-size their environments, we help lower power, cooling, and hardware footprints, supporting both cost efficiency and environmental goals. Our digital transformation strategy centers on simplicity and agility.

We help organizations modernize applications, adopt hybrid and multicloud models, and operate with greater resilience and security. Platform-led modernization allows customers to move faster, scale intelligently, and adapt to changing business demands without added operational burden. AI is a core pillar of our strategy.

We are enabling customers to move from experimentation to production-ready AI by providing AI-ready infrastructure, integrated data services, and operational consistency across environments. We are also making incremental investment in partner enablement and skills to ensure AI solutions deliver real, measurable business outcomes.