Reconciling with the new normal

How has the company reviewed and adjust its workforce to work from home during the current lockdown due to Covid19?

First and foremost, our top priority is to protect the health and safety of our employees, customers, partners, and communities. We are assessing the situation daily, keeping the well-being of all of our stakeholders’ safety top of mind. As a company, we are following the guidelines issued by the World Health Organization and local, regional and country guidelines to guide our actions.

At the start of the crisis, we immediately began the implementation of our business continuity plan, which is driven by a small group of global executives representing all of the critical functions inside Nutanix.

Capitalizing on our own technologies and business continuity plan, Nutanix remains open for virtual business around the world. We have also implemented a number of precautionary measures to ensure uninterrupted service to our customers and partners and the continued safety and productivity of our employees. In an effort to protect the health of our employees and visitors, we have implemented work-from-home procedures for our global workforce and ensured employees have access to laptops, VDI infrastructure, adequate internet bandwidth, and expanded VPN capabilities.

What have been some of the challenges that you have overcome?

As mentioned, we have transitioned smoothly to the new normal. In fact we have seen an increasing interest in our remote working solutions from enterprises in the region. Our solutions (for example, virtual desktop with our partner Citrix or desktop-as-a-service with our product Frame) can help organizations adapt to this rapidly-evolving situation by allowing them to support their employees to work productively from remote locations. We have many customers in different verticals, including government entities and educational institutions and it is a chance to help organizations quickly provide viable work- or learn-from-home options.

Is there a lot of relearning and reskilling expected from employees?

As a global IT company, our current infrastructure was designed to support remote work, with half our global workforce already working remotely in their day-to-day roles. We were already well prepared to continue running our business and focusing on our customers during a crisis.

How are specific job functions like logistics/ after sales support that is part of technology business impacted and being coped with?

We’ve conducted a supply chain analysis and created contingency plans with our key suppliers. Based on current information, we do not anticipate any immediate supply constraints, though the situation is obviously fluid and could change. We will keep our community in the loop as new information becomes available.

Our worldwide support teams and other key functions remain up and running and ready to attend to all customer and partner needs. Based on the analysis we’ve done to assess both hardware and software support capabilities, we have contingency plans in place to allow us to continue to provide 24×7 worldwide support to our customers at this time.

What special message would you like to send out to partners and customers about overcoming the challenges presented during the current COVID’19 crisis?

Enterprises will stand a better chance of enduring the situation if they have already modernized core infrastructure. They will be ready to meet the challenges of the current environment – or any other challenges for that matter – i.e start – ups, rivals, pandemics

Organizations need to look to modernize their IT infrastructure by doing the following:

• increase automation
• increase self-service
• greater use of cloud and mobile platforms
• optimize data – decisions should always be made on the data, despite emotional times

The Digital Workspace: Why Should Enterprises Virtualize Desktops and Applications. Intelligent digital workspaces, delivered by on-premises virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or desktop as a service (DaaS), enable users to access applications and information from anywhere while data remains secure, making them ideal for end-user computing needs. Physical desktops and laptops are becoming a poor fit for today’s dynamic, digital workplace.

In the old way of working, company employees are tethered closely to a desktop or laptop PC for much of their work. A digital workspace provides greater flexibility, so that employees can access the applications and data they need— from any device and any location. This is a much better fit for the way many businesses, across many industries, operate today. Instead of running on a local device, the applications and services of the digital workspace run in a datacenter and output is transmitted quickly and securely to the user across a network.

Many organizations across the Middle East are dealing with the reality of needing to set up all their employees to work remotely, while still maintaining access to the same tools and applications they require to be productive. To help organizations deal with this challenge, today Nutanix announced a new offer called FastTrack for VDI to support companies anywhere in the world quickly deploy a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution. Setting up and provisioning desktops, something that used to take weeks, will now be done in record time.