Nutanix: Businesses want simplicity and resiliency

As organizations focus on AI deployment and managing their digital infrastructure, Jay Tuseth, Vice President and General Manager of Asia Pacific & Japan at Nutanix there are three key trends indicating a stronger demand for simplicity and resiliency.

Nutanix continues to record steady growth as the vendor recorded an 18% year-over-year revenue growth with strong free cash flow generation. Nutanix also added 2,700+ new customers globally in its fiscal year 2025, clearly indicating itself as a leader in the key markets it serves.

According to Jay Tuseth, Vice President and General Manager of Asia Pacific & Japan at Nutanix, there are three different trends that Nutanix has observed over the past quarter that are driving businesses today. The first trend is how businesses are looking to run AI at the edge without compromising resilience. The second trend is about how businesses are looking close protection gaps, especially as infrastructure shifts. And the third trend is focused on maintaining continuity and control in an age of volatility.

“Together, these trends essentially share with us the resilience imperative, the need to design smarter infrastructure for a digital future, and how organizations do that,” Tuseth said.

Tuseth, who joined Nutanix about six months ago, explained that customers are demanding infrastructure that can process, store and analyze data locally. With businesses looking to deploy agentic AI models, there is only increased pressure on existing infrastructure. As such, customers are wanting simplified infrastructure that can scale and manage business processes with ease as well as reduce silos and embed AI-readiness into platforms.

“A lot of that has to do with the ability to drive the demand that's happening from infrastructure that can process it locally. So, the intention is for organizations to drive infrastructure as close to the data as possible. That's even becoming more of an acute challenge now with GenAI and Agentic AI, and new types of applications that really drive the need for new, more complex infrastructure, including at the edge. So, what we see from organizations is that they want to be able to manage these large, distributed, complex environments with the same level of simplicity that they're able to use with a more standardized platform in a data center. And a lot of that has to do with the ability to reduce silos and embed AI-ready platforms, regardless of where that's required,” Tuseth explained.

Having a simplified infrastructure would mean closing the gaps to have better resiliency. This means having unified protection in a cloud native world. But it’s not an easy task as there are enterprise-wide risks such as backup, recovery, portability, and governance. At the same time, application sprawl can lead to unsustainable solutions resulting in IT teams managing much more.

Businesses want a unified approach to run and protect containers and traditional VMs. This includes having a simplified platform that can support modern applications while retaining enterprise-grade reliability.

“That's one of the things that, from a Nutanix perspective, we really look at as our capability to support people, bringing that enterprise-class support and capability with embedded components and capabilities that are needed to the system. That's another key trend that we're seeing. It's not about adding new tools; it's actually the opposite. It's about simplifying the tools that you have so you can do more with less,” Tuseth said.

While a simplified reliable platform means using the cloud, it may not necessarily promise resiliency. Rising cloud costs, regulatory shifts, vendor uncertainty prompting urgent decisions continue to be the challenge when using the cloud. Upcoming product changes and uncertainty around support is delaying migration while increased risk from cost-prohibitive or poorly supported solutions indicate how businesses struggle to get resiliency from the cloud.

In short, to have simplicity and resiliency, businesses are looking towards portability and autonomy for long-term continuity as well as access to adaptive architectures and the ability to move anywhere, reduce lock-in and keep control of their environments.

“Where we see this the most is in the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, and how that has changed the relationship between VMware and their partners, and their customers, as they've made a series of decisions that have driven a lot of uncertainty and unease into that market specifically. A lot of this has to do with the rapid pace of decision-making and the ability to drive costs up by creating bundles of products that people may or may not want to use.”

“The perspective of having a single-vendor strategy around VMware is something we increasingly see organizations moving away from, as their ELAs – signed three to five years ago, before Broadcom acquired VMware – come due. This creates an inflection point where those organizations begin to act differently. So, what they need is the ability to have application portability and the ability to make autonomous decisions for long-term continuity of their operations,” Tuseth added.

It’s all about resiliency and simplicity

For Tuseth, resilience is no longer reactive for organizations. Instead, he believes it's a proactive foundation, not just driving agility and innovation.

“It's a proactive way for IT operators to stay employed, because as soon as you lose resiliency, the rest of the business really starts to notice quickly, and that's when pain and challenges start to occur for people. So, whether it's AI at the edge, containerized applications that are spreading via the sprawl of applications, or the need to manage applications in a variety of different formats – whether it's bare metal, virtualized, or containerized AI-specific applications – in any of those areas, people and organizations thrive on a few things,” he said.

Tuseth also believes that simplicity is the most important element to resiliency, because it allows a smaller IT organization with a limited budget – which essentially describes every IT organization – to do more with less.

“That simplification reduces human error. It allows them to continue innovating and driving more capability, into the business and driving better business outcomes. From a Nutanix perspective, I've always thought of us as the great simplifier in the data center, and we've expanded that to have a platform that drives simplification into new areas and breathes life into areas that people really need around containerized applications and AI applications. We, at this point, are delivering workshops to our customers on how they can build an agentic AI application in a matter of hours on our AI platform. It's that simple to use. It's clicks instead of code, and it really makes it simple for organizations to drive innovation with urgency and pace and speed that's needed today,” Tuseth added.

With that said, Tuseth believes the key now is all about driving better business outcomes for customers and how IT can do the same for their customers. The resilience imperative is something he feels is critically important in conversations with customers. And enabling these conversations will be the relationship Nutanix has with its partner ecosystem.

The partner perspective

Nutanix’s partner ecosystem continues to grow, especially with more partners finding the vendor easier to work with, especially when it comes to providing customers with solutions that are simplified and resilient.

Tim Hope Chief Technology Officer, Versent echoes Tuseth’s views on how businesses are focused on simplicity and resiliency. Versent, a leading technology consultancy based in Australia, architects, builds and operates cloud-native applications, data streams, platforms, and services for its customers.

“We're seeing customers start to look at how they bring AI in safely compared to what we saw at the start around the proof of concept. Technology is moving so fast that the proof-of-concepts are being completed. The next step is “how do I adopt it?” and the conversation is changing to: “Do I have the right AI frameworks in place?” and “Do I have the right policies with my sovereign requirements coming through, my data residency, am I connecting it into a platform or a capability that my business can adopt quickly?” So we have definitely seen a change, and our customers are asking us to come and help them define their policies, put up their governance frameworks, and manage the risk of AI adoption, particularly in regulated industries or industries that have compliance requirements,” Hope said.

He also mentioned that customers are now looking at how they can re-architect their network ecosystem, to make sure that it's secure all the way from the edge back to the computer.

“So, they're thinking more holistically, rather than just putting AI on. They’re really thinking about how do I actually change and build an infrastructure platform that's compliant and scalable for those future workloads, future demand that we know is going to come, so we want to really be ready to adopt that more quickly,” Hope added.

Hope is also witnessing customers wanting to simplify complex environments. He said a lot of customers are experiencing high operational costs and are not getting the desired value from it.

“A lot of it's going into operational maintenance, multiple platforms that do similar sets of capabilities, and it comes into skillset, training, development and how they kind of maintain their skills inside an organization. So, with customers having this complex landscape, they're really looking at us to say, “How do you help us simplify? Have we actually got the right capability for our requirements?”,” he said.

For example, when Kubernetes came into the market, Hope said a lot of customers deployed it. However, they didn't really think about operational control or whether it was the right solution to the problem.

“Organizations have very powerful investments in these types of platforms, but they may not need that level. It’s about looking at their needs, matching them through, and asking whether they can simplify the platform landscape, making it more operationally stable or resilient to get better value out of that investment. I see this trend coming quite strongly at the momen. Organizations are focused on optimizing and simplifying to get more value from the investments they’ve made,” Hope said.

Working with partners

Being a 100% channel organization, Tuseth highlighted that all of the revenue Nutanix delivers is through its partners, and they work with them in a couple of different areas.

“One is a services capability that they deliver. We look to our partners to be experts in their own and adjacent areas so they can deliver high-value services to customers that allow greater resilience. We also look to them to be part of a stronger ecosystem. They may be working with Nutanix, but also with vendors like Dynatrace for observability, for example. The ability to combine those technologies drives greater resiliency for customers,” Tesuth said.

For Versent, Hope said resilience is key when delivering and building for customers with trust as the outcome. As a services business, Versent is there to help a customer achieve that outcome.

“We spend a lot of time investing in advisory and architecture capabilities to make sure resilience is designed into the solution. From a delivery perspective, we ensure resilience is built in and tested as part of the project. We make sure the resilience conversation is matched to the outcomes customers need to achieve right from the start,” he said.

“For customers already running environments, we use resilience-based assessments to check. For managed services, we make sure it stays there. Or if customers have issues, we work with Nutanix and partners on specific assessments to look at whether the resilience matches expectations. We ran one recently where the customer thought resilience was at a certain level, but our engineering team went in, reviewed the code, and showed what was actually implemented. So, it's about tying together both the engineered outcomes and advisory assessments to make sure resilience is designed upfront and tested throughout,” Hope explained.

Meanwhile, Tuseth also highlighted that Nutanix has made enhancements to Nutanix Move as more customers look to migrate from VMware. Previously, customers had to move a VMware VM to change it to an AHV VM and then move back. Now, Nutanix provides the ability to do that with an in-place migration, which has really helped accelerate the process.

“We’re seeing acceleration in adoption, and it’s not a difficult utility to use. The majority of our customers are very comfortable with it. Of course, large migrations take time. If an organization has a renewal due in two or three years, and they have 50,000-70,000 cores or VMs to migrate, it will take time. So, we need to plan carefully and effectively to finish before the renewal date of their current agreement with Broadcom. But that’s more about project planning,” Tuseth said.

When asked what he thought about VMware stating 10,000 customers have acquired VMware's flagship Cloud Foundation stack, but not all have implemented it, Tuseth believes it was because those customers didn't have a choice.

“They were already on VMware, and it was too challenging to get off. With the bundled pricing Broadcom has moved towards, they really don’t have a choice but to buy the full stack. So, they had to buy it, even if they’re not deploying it, using it, or intend to. That’s where a lot of the friction is coming from with Broadcom and their customers. And yes, that absolutely creates an opportunity for Nutanix where we have a far more customer-intimate approach to the market,” he concluded.