Rowen Grierson, Sales Director Sub-Saharan Africa, Nutanix.

Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, announced that local distributor Pinnacle has selected the Nutanix Cloud Platform to support launch of the company’s Pinnacle Cloud, providing local partners with a place to land their cloud sales and add Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Disaster Recover-as-a-Service (DRaaS), and Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) solutions to their cloud service offerings.

A leading local distributor, Pinnacle, uses the Nutanix Cloud Platform software as the basis of its recently launched Pinnacle Cloud service and will be hosting the environment at the Teraco African Data Exchange. Pinnacle’s initial offering off of its cloud platform will allow its partners to purchase small, medium, large, and extra-large sized virtual machines on behalf of end-user customers who can then scale these over time. While also providing them with a path to the multi-cloud because of Nutanix's interoperability with all the major public cloud (hyperscaler) providers.

"When navigating how we wanted to build the Pinnacle Cloud, we decided that we needed a partner that would not dictate the services or costs we could offer our partners, and they could offer their customers," Charlene Oosthuizen, Cloud Solutions Manager, Pinnacle ICT. "We have enjoyed a fruitful seven-year relationship with Nutanix. Its flexibility, the quality of its solutions, and the speed at which it can scale made it the perfect partner for Pinnacle Cloud."

According to Oosthuizen, Pinnacle Cloud's open architecture will allow partners to broker multiple cloud environments on behalf of customers. Whether these are AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, regardless of the hypervisor they run on, such as Nutanix AHV (Acropolis Hypervisor), Microsoft Hyper-V or even VMware ESXi. With Nutanix, these customers will benefit from a centralised management plane to manage, track the performance of, and merge cloud workloads across public and private clouds.

In addition, clients can take advantage of the hardware-agnostic nature of Nutanix and can elect to run the hardware of their choice within Pinnacle Cloud if they opt to not purchase their cloud real estate as part of its IaaS offering. Further, the Nutanix DRaaS offering is the first of its kind within the African region.

"Because of the ease of use of the Nutanix backbone, Pinnacle Cloud will give our partner's technical teams their weekends back. In short, it allows them to upskill instead of upscale technical teams because it removes the complexity of deploying and/or integrating with other cloud partners. The price point at which we can offer VMs is also a gamechanger for any local business that wants to scale into the cloud but don’t have the finances to do so,” adds Oosthuizen.

Partners will also be able to tap into the extensive knowledge of the Pinnacle professional services teams to help build cloud blueprints, runbooks, and playbooks for a cloud platform they can white label. Pinnacle Cloud will offer partners a range of purchasing options and, because of it being hosted at Teraco, provides direct onramps to all major hyperscalers with a presence in South Africa.

Central to the Pinnacle Cloud services is the delivery of payment structures, rental options, and financial flexibility to partners.

“In a data-driven business landscape where Africa marches towards digital sovereignty, providing rich data services in a subscription model is emerging as a business requirement. With Pinnacle Cloud, we believe we can collectively help fill this gap,” states Rowen Grierson, Sales Director Sub-Saharan Africa, Nutanix. “As a member of the Nutanix Elevate Service Provider Program, we believe that Pinnacle is in an enviable position to deliver a consistent commercially viable cloud platform that offers a secure multi-tenant enterprise cloud anywhere to host any application, and at scale.

"Pinnacle always remains one step ahead of the needs of its customers. And at a time where cloud costs are starting to limit and not fuel innovation, Pinnacle Cloud provides customers with a secure, robust, cost-effective cloud platform from a partner they can trust, helping allow customers to map their technology spend closer to the businesses commercial models,” ends Grierson.