Nutanix Appoints Shree Balachandran As Its First A/NZ Cloud Economist

Nutanix has appointed Shree Balachandran to the newly created position of Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) Cloud Economist. The industry veteran will work closely with the local Nutanix leadership and sales team, as well as the partner community, to help organisations achieve greater value in their cloud environments.

Balachandran is based in Melbourne and brings more than 25 years of strategy, sales, and operations experience from leading technology companies such as HPE and Oracle. He said cloud economics is front of mind as companies retreat from ‘all-in’ strategies and cloud costs including ingress and egress (transferring data in and out from an environment) continue to soar.

“Many companies in Australia and New Zealand that said a few years ago, ‘we’re putting it all in public cloud’, hit a crossroads at about 15 per cent of their data, where going any further is either impossible or prohibitively expensive,” said Balachandran.

“This has crystalised the idea of hybrid multicloud strategies as the way forward, but many are still unsure of how to get there, what data and applications should sit where and for how long, and where they should focus their investments. Nutanix is building the blueprint for how they can do this and I’m looking forward to helping the company educate the market and execute on its vision.”

Balachandran’s appointment comes as Australian companies are expected to spend $19.9 billion, and New Zealand companies $3 billion, on cloud services this year alone. It also follows Microsoft, which partners with Nutanix on its Clusters (NC2) hybrid cloud platform, announcing it would invest $5 billion to expand its hyperscale cloud and AI infrastructure in Australia.

“There’s no one-size-fits-all, but if your environment has too much legacy on-premises infrastructure, you’re losing out. If you have too much public cloud and no system in place to make your data interoperable between different clouds, you’re losing out. Without applying an economic lens to cloud spend, costs will soar – particularly as data grows and grows and intensive applications like AI take hold,” Balachandran said.

Cloud economics to drive IT sustainability

According to Balachandran, sustainability is starting to become a major factor in IT decisions as organisations across respond to government initiatives such as the Australian Federal Government’s Net Zero Authority, and New Zealand publishing guidelines encouraging agencies and enterprises to consider sustainability in cloud procurement.

“We’ve seen in other regions that when legislation and guidelines come in, organisations start asking different questions when they buy ICT services. That’s starting to happen now in A/NZ and it’s evident in the conversations Nutanix is having with end users and partners,” he said.

“As IT budgets remain under pressure, we need to find ways to be more sustainable by maintaining – or ideally lowering – costs, and cloud economics is an ideal discipline to achieve that.”

Balachandran joins a team of Nutanix cloud economists who have been appointed around the world as the company puts a major emphasis on improving customers’ cloud’s value on their balance sheet.

Damien McDade, managing director, Nutanix A/NZ said the importance of cloud economics and Balachandran’s experience is timely.

“Shree brings a wealth of experience and will be an invaluable financial resource for our customers and partners,” he said.

“This role speaks to the core of concerns A/NZ CIOs, CFOs and others have as they seek to get to the next stages of business transformation while making good on the sizable investments they’ve already made in cloud computing. We know Nutanix is vital to that equation and our focus on, and investment in, cloud economics is testament to that.”

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