Five key points from Nutanix CEO on the future

“You can't be static and just do the one thing that you're doing because things move and things change very dynamically. And we have to evolve, and that's what we do,” says Rajiv Ramaswami, CEO of Nutanix.

During the media conference at the Nutanix .Next Summit in Chicago, Rajiv Ramaswami shared some key takeaways from the announcements made at the summit. While the general theme of the summit was all about enabling customers to have a simplified AI journey as they move towards developing and running more agentic AI applications, the vendor also focused on enabling its partners to have more opportunities.

“A lot of our announcements at the conference are about how Nutanix can provide this unified, single modern platform to help our customers run their apps today, their apps tomorrow, and the future with agentic AI. And all the announcements pretty much fit into this umbrella. The second thing that I want to point out is the ecosystem that we're building and growing. Nutanix continues to grow, and more of the ecosystem views us as a platform company as our customers start using Nutanix for a wide range of use cases. That's bringing more big partners into our ecosystem,” Ramaswami said.

Indeed, the vendor has come a long way in its growth and is quickly becoming a preferred option as well for organizations that are looking to get the most flexible options available to them in their AI journey, while also being able to save cost at the same time.

The vendor has also witnessed a jump in partners over the past two years, especially after Broadcom made significant changes to their partner programs. These partners are now focused on driving more growth for Nutanix as the not only have the drive but also the capabilities in doing so.

What follows are the five key areas which Ramaswami talked about during the media conference at the summit.

Nutanix is no longer just an HCI company

According to Ramaswami, the growth and direction of the company to go beyond just being a HCI company is fundamentally based on what they can do more for customers as it has a direct impact on the market opportunities the vendor is witnessing and should be doing.

“Five years ago, we were an HCI company. Largely, many customers were using us for their initial workload choice, being in user computing, VDI and such. And we continue to hold that HCI platform to be able to handle all the workloads that they run. But at the same time, we recognize then that the world is changing around us. Our customers want to operate in the public clouds. And so, we focus on evolving from a HCI company to a hybrid cloud company, working across with partners from AWS, Azure, Google, and such,” he said.

Ramaswami also mentioned that the next stage that Nutanix sees for the next few years is around the evolution of modern cloud native applications and AI.

“This whole notion of external storage was not something we were doing. But, again, we saw an opportunity to do that given what was happening in the industry. The first thing that happened was this Broadcom acquisition, which changed the game for many customers, just considering us for just a hypervisor portion of the business. And so, there was an opportunity there. Storage providers out there who didn't want to work with us in the past now all want to work with us because they see us as much more friendly and synergistic compared to Broadcom. So, we took the opportunity there,” he explained.

For Ramaswami, it is all about helping customers in the external storage opportunity, and now as customers are building and running modern applications. they're looking at inferencing workloads and at agentic AI use cases.

“We're taking the platform forward to help them meet that. So that's the next several years of Nutanix. And it's just an evolution of us as a company with the times. And I tell you this, every tech company has to do this. You can't be static and just do the one thing that you're doing because things move and things change very dynamically. And we have to evolve, and that's what we do,” he said.

More customers migrating to Nutanix

As Ramaswami clearly pointed out, customer sentiment continues to be negative around Broadcom. From Nutanix’s perspective, the vendor is aware that Broadcom has an instal base of probably 300,000 customers or so.

“We are targeting about 165,000 of those customers, commercial and enterprise, commercial and mid-market. And we have a segmented approach to go after those customers. Today, we have about 30,000 customers. In the last quarter, we added about 1,000 new customers. And we expect that to continue. We expect that there's still a lot of opportunity, and it's going to come in waves. We had a first wave of customers that started their migrations right after the deal closed because they knew what was coming. And they wanted to get out before their next renewal came. And we successfully migrated many of them, and many of them are here at the show talking about how they completed their migrations,” he explained.

At the same time, while there were a lot of customers migrating, there were also a set of customers that didn't migrate. These customers wanted to see what was going to happen.

“They had to do another renewal with Broadcom. And that happened. That was kind of the next wave. They did their renewal. And now some of them are looking to migrate. And they've started migrations. They want to get out before the next renewal. So that's happening. And then there'll be more. VCF9 will be another trigger point. So, there'll be multiple trigger points. And we expect this to come gradually,” Ramaswami said.

On new offerings for Service Providers

For Ramaswami, when Nutanix talks about service provider customers, it is still a relatively new area for them. He said that Nutanix didn't focus on service providers much in the initial part of the journey.

But over the last few years, the vendor has built a dedicated team focusing on service providers which was initially for compute-centric workloads as there were a lot of VMware cloud service providers out there who are looking for an alternate partner.

“And we are very much, therefore, investing in our stack to create all the capabilities they need. Now, at the same time, we also recognize that there's a new breed of service providers emerging who are focused on delivering AI services using GPUs, whether it's GPUs as a service, whether it's models as a service and such. And so, we're also targeting that group,” he said.

“By the way, there's an overlap there. So, a lot of service providers today who are delivering compute services are also looking to deliver AI GPU services. And so, our investments in the multi-tenancy capabilities that we announced with Service Provider Central are very much geared towards both neoclouds or these GPU providers and the traditional service providers and some mix of them,” he explained.

Data sovereignty

When asked about how data sovereignty fits into Nutanix’s growth plans, Ramaswami said that data sovereignty is 100% here to stay.

“There's no doubt about it. And when we say sovereignty, it's not just sovereignty of the data. But it's also being self-reliant in terms of running your own infrastructure with your own people. And there's a third element to it, which is also trying to reduce independence of specific technology partners as well. So, sovereignty is such a big part of everything we do here. And I look at this as an opportunity for companies like Nutanix because people are now going to start building,” he said.

Ramaswami also believes that countries are going to start building their own sovereign clouds, not just for CPU-centric applications but also for GPU-centric applications.

“We see that as a significant opportunity ahead for us,” he added.

NVIDIA and AMD partnership

On the partnership with NVIDIA and AMD, Ramaswami said the partnership works both ways. With NVIDIA, Nutanix has been working with them for many years on the GPU front, supporting all their GPUs

“NVIDIA are a de facto standard. And so, as we look at inferencing and agentic applications, everything we do is to take their GPUs, virtualize them, run them very efficiently with our stack and help our customers run those workloads on top. And that’s been the nature of our collaboration with them. Now, NVIDIA sees us as a good partner to take them into the enterprise market. But they're not selling into enterprise much They don't have an enterprise sales force. They don't have an enterprise platform. They are selling largely directly into the big public clouds and the AI companies, native AI companies, and the neoclouds. But they see this big opportunity.

As such, Ramaswami said that NVIDIA are now very interested in working with Nutanix to help take their solution into the market.

With AMD making an investment in Nutanix, Ramaswami said that they are now the second player. What this means is AMD is doing everything they can to catch up and win.

“This was a two-part investment. And they saw us as a partner to help, first of all, get a complete solution that enterprises could use in the market. And second, as a big way to help them sell it to the enterprise. Because they don't sell directly into the enterprise, but when we go there and sell our solution, and when the customers decide to use AMD GPUs, that's how they benefit. So that's why they did this two-part investment in us. They invested up to $100 million to help build these solutions, support their GPUs, take them to the market. And then another $150 million in stock. Our investments were aligned and that’s the nature of the relationship with both of them,” he said.