Nutanix leads Kuwait to the cloud

Kuwait

Mohamad Makki, country manager of Nutanix in Kuwait, talks to The Energy Year about how cloud services can make domestic companies more efficient and support Kuwait’s digital transformation objectives. Nutanix is a global cloud software company specialised in hyperconverged infrastructure solutions that make clouds invisible and free customers to focus on their business outcomes.

Can you give us an overview of the company and its main clients?
Nutanix is a US cloud computing company founded in 2009 that sells software solutions for data centres and hybrid multi-cloud deployments. As a global leader in cloud software, we offer a unified platform that integrates infrastructure and management to enable the smooth operation of data and apps across clouds. Our software-defined architecture adapts to various hardware and cloud options and provides consistent operations and data services across cloud, edge and core environments.
When Nutanix started, the idea was to provide hybrid converged solutions, combining software-defined storage and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) – something like the web-scale engineering infrastructures of Google and Facebook. Through the years, Nutanix developed HCI as its core business, with the ultimate aim of simplifying business environments by creating unified systems that joined all the elements of a traditional data centre: storage, computing, networking and management. Building on its legacy as a pioneer of HCI, Nutanix has managed to integrate them all into one single platform.
As far as our client portfolio is concerned, banking is a key sector for us in Kuwait and we have several prestigious banks as customers. Warba Bank has deployed the full range of Nutanix solutions and we have been a main technology partner in the bank’s digitalisation journey. We have enabled them to leverage agile, efficient, multi-cloud-capable IT to become a truly digital enterprise. We have carried out similarly successful implementations at many other banks in Kuwait.

How do you assess the developments within the domestic information communications technology (ICT) sector and what role will Nutanix play?
The Kuwait government expects expenditures in ICT to reach USD 10 billion by the end of 2024, with the sector growing through technologies related to AI, big data and cloud computing. Moreover, the Kuwait Vision 2035 plan highly emphasises the importance of digital transformation in stepping up the country’s competitiveness as well as improving efficiency across the economy, and we envision ourselves to be a main partner for Kuwait in this regard.
Domestic enterprises, both public and private, are increasingly keen to adopt hybrid cloud solutions that bring cost and operational efficiencies, as well as security, flexibility and scalability. As a global cloud computing leader, we play a very important role in providing enterprises in Kuwait with a cloud computing roadmap and advising them on best practices that will enable them to harness the transformational power of the cloud.
An example from the public sector is the Ministry of Higher Education. It has around 10 branches worldwide and, before moving to Amazon Web Services through Nutanix in 2021, each branch had its own hardware and IT team. Now they manage them all from Kuwait’s head office, with no need for hardware or IT teams on the premises.

What would you identify as the key advantages of using Nutanix’s services?
Due to the avalanche of new applications brought by digital transformation and the increasing push to develop innovative products and get them to market as quickly as possible, IT landscapes have become infinitely more complex. Traditional, siloed operating models and tools just can’t keep up. They’re slow, complicated, expensive and require specialised skills.
What enterprises need today is a consistent operating model to manage disparate environments. Nutanix pioneered hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to break down legacy silos by merging compute, storage and networking into a single, easy-to-use data centre platform. Now, as the cloud has emerged as a critical component of IT infrastructure, Nutanix is breaking down silos once again, this time between premises, the cloud and the edge. We call this a hybrid multi-cloud platform.
Nutanix Cloud Platform brings together infrastructure and management under a unified and secure platform that runs data and applications at any scale and across clouds. We provide the performance and reliability to replace traditional SAN [storage area network] environments with an architecture and capabilities to power modern cloud-native applications. Nutanix Cloud Platform empowers you to build a hybrid multi-cloud tailored to your business and application needs.
We deliver simplicity with one-click ease of use and life cycle management, high performance by accelerating an organisation’s most demanding data and applications, intelligence through an optimised and secure platform for the hybrid multi-cloud and resilience with an always-on architecture.

Can you walk us through the company’s main achievements?
The beauty of cloud solutions is that they are truly cross-sectoral, as their applications are extensive and multi-purpose. Nutanix was the first to realise the impact that HCI might have on improving businesses and now we are the segment’s leader as acknowledged by Forrester Research. They evaluated 11 HCI vendors on their current offerings, market presence and strategy, and Nutanix emerged as a leader with the highest possible scores in the vision and innovation criteria. Nutanix also received the highest scores in the storage and data, and support and experience criteria.
We were also named a Visionary in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage for the third time in a row, on account of our strong product vision aimed at addressing demand for simple and secure ways to manage and natively protect data.
Our Group is innovation-focused and always investing in R&D to enhance our products and add new ones to make our customers’ experience easier. We do our best to add security, performance, automation and cost-effectiveness to their operations, and to provide them with a streamlined system to conduct their activities.
To give you some numbers, International Data Corporation and Forrester highlighted in some of their latest reports that if a company invests in Nutanix for five years, the total cost of ownership will be lowered by up to 60%. And for some of the main products that we have, like the Nutanix Database Service, ROI reached 600%.
Last but not least, our net promoter score has been outstanding for nine consecutive years, hitting 90-plus over 100 when our competitors are reaching around 50.

What is the involvement of the Group in the oil and gas sector?
Total Gas & Power, a leading supplier of energy for industrial, commercial, public sector and business customers in EMEA is one of the many clients that have turned to Nutanix for IT consolidation. We provided them with a modern infrastructure platform that supports digital transformation and multi-cloud operations and is also able to support legacy applications as required.
The oil and gas sector in Kuwait is of extreme interest to us because historically it has been the first to adopt new technologies to enhance productivity and performance while keeping costs under control. That is why we are engaging in assessment studies with oil and gas players and targeting the K-companies.
Finally, there is a lot of excitement around AI deployment. In 2023, we announced the Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box solution designed to help customers harness the capabilities of large language model workloads, which is going to be a key asset for customers looking to jump-start their AI and machine learning innovation, including in the oil and gas sector and the supply chain connected to it.

How important is Kuwait for the Group’s strategy and where do you see the company in the next couple of years?
Nutanix started in Kuwait more than six years ago and now we are expanding our presence in the country, hiring new people and launching a new business plan: Kuwait 2.0.
In the GCC region, Kuwait is one of the key countries that we are focusing on. We believe that the country has the right vision to achieve the targets it has set, and we are here to support the government and private enterprises in their digitalisation journeys. Our main target is to lead this journey as a hybrid multi-cloud provider and enable all our customers’ environments to be cloud-ready by the end of 2025.

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