Thomas Duryea Logicalis wins Nutanix's biggest partner deal in Australia

Michael Chanter - CEO, ​Thomas Duryea Logicalis

Thomas Duryea Logicalis (TDL) has helped Swinburne University of Technology implement Nutanix's Enterprise Cloud OS software, marking the biggest deal for a Nutanix partner in Australia so far.

TDL CEO Michael Chanter told ARN that the project was the biggest deal in size, value and infrastructure for the technology provider, in partnership with the hyper-converged infrastructure vendor.

"For a customer to make an investment of that size, particularly a customer that is sophisticated in terms of the technical knowledge, is a really good reinforcement of the solution, the quality of the product that Nutanix has and the solution we put together," Chanter told ARN.

Through the Enterprise Cloud OS software, the organisation is able to build and manage a hybrid cloud.

Furthermore, Swinburne University offers online courses and on campus students the opportunity to study certain units online.

Therefore, the university relies heavily on technology, with the IT department exploring ways to deliver easy-to-use IT services to the students, coupled with a back-end infrastructure that enabled Swinburne to scale and automate such services.

The Nutanix solution allowed the Swinburne IT team to provide students access to a self-service system where they can browse, choose and deploy the IT solution they need for final year projects, including complex mobile application development programs.

Other benefits to students include using other automated services such as quickly procuring more storage.

"The size of the project demonstrates the trust that Swinburne has in TDL to deliver the solution because it is a significant investment and it is delivering services which are critical to the university," Nutanix channel director Andrew Diamond told ARN.

Meanwhile, Nutanix vice president global channel sales Rodney Foreman, described TDL's work with Swinburne as "something unique".

"One thing that I find cool about this win is that TDL leveraged more of the Nutanix portifolio and incorporated our Calm product, which makes this project unique," Foreman told ARN.

Swinburne's IT team is taking advantage of Nutanix Calm, for cloud application lifecycle management, to automate those processes and migrate workloads and apps between cloud environments.

"We selected Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software because it supports our hybrid cloud strategy of migrating workloads back and forth between public cloud and on-premises without having to think about it,” Swinburne director of infrastructure and operations, information technology, Simon Naughton, added.

"However, the real benefit is for the students. Nutanix and our IT partner, TDL, help us keep Swinburne students focused on researching and developing the applications they are building, which ultimately provides them with a better education."

With Nutanix's solution, Naughton said Swinburne will no longer have to spend weeks, or even months building the infrastructure needed to support the students’ requests.

As a result, the organisation also has better security, increased performance and IT vendor consolidation with the new system.

From a channel perspective, TDL has also joined BEarena and Qirx as Nutanix's Elite partners in the Australia and New Zealand region.

According to Nutanix, the Elite status is awarded only to its most successful and loyal partners, with TDL closing more deals than any other partner during a 12-month period.

Therefore, TDL will now have access to additional incentive and marketing programs, leads and promotional opportunities, along with deal registration and deep dive technical training.