Nutanix Appoints AWS’ Balakrishnan Anantharaman to Lead India Sales

Enterprise Cloud services firm Nutanix has appointed Balakrishnan Anantharaman as its new Vice President and Managing Director of Sales for India. Anantharaman, an IT veteran was heading Amazon Web Services’ Financial Services and Manufacturing Verticals for the Large Enterprise Business in India, prior to joining Nutanix.

With more than 25 years of IT industry management experience, Anantharaman will help drive the company’s business growth in India in his new role. His knowledge and insight of the enterprise landscape and a proven track record for rapidly growing business make him ideally placed to redefine Nutanix’s business in India, the company mentions in a statement.

A provider of cloud software and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, Nutanix has full-fledged operations in India from 2016. The top executive post was vacant at Nutanix India, since Sunil Mahale left the company in October 2018. Mahale joined Nutanix as vice president and managing director in December 2015.  The new appointment is aimed at the company’s expansion strategy to India’s larger enterprise segment.

At AWS, Anantharaman built the India Go to Market segment and helped grow the business significantly during his tenure. Prior to that, he spent 8 years at Dell EMC in a variety of senior sales and leadership roles before finally becoming Senior Director, Global Services Lead.

“We are all delighted to have Bala (Anantharaman) on board. He will add his focus, structure and direction to our cutting-edge solutions here in India.” said Neville Vincent, VP, South Asia Pacific at Nutanix.

“We took the decision early on to wait for the right caliber of candidate, but the wait has been worth it. The team, our customers and our partners are all relishing the opportunities ahead and have already communicated their immense satisfaction with our choice of leader,” he said.

Speaking on his appointment, Anantharaman said, “I am delighted to be joining Nutanix at such an exciting time for the company and the industry. When you have built a career on generating growth and then get asked to take a rapidly growing industry leader to an even higher level – you don’t need to stop to think. You jump on board. The battle lines are being drawn as public and private clouds converge. True success will lie with the companies like Nutanix that can drive innovation and value for their customers.”

Anantharaman’s appointment comes at a pivotal time for India’s cloud sector. As Digital India continues apace, hyper-converged infrastructure and hybrid cloud are seen as key to keeping the country’s enterprises relevant and competitive in a digital era. Even incumbent public cloud providers are embracing hybrid as a key component of their offering.

The appointment follows increased investment in its India business by Nutanix including an expansion of its engineering and support operations. Nutanix considers the new moves a clear win over its competition in the country’s rapidly growing cloud market.

In a report released last year by Nutanix, jointly with  Vanson Bourne, said that Idia is set to lead the world in hybrid cloud usage and adoption by 2020. The report found the adoption of hybrid cloud workloads in India will more than triple from 13 percent today to 43 percent in the aforesaid period of time.