Nutanix is banking on a bolstered platform approach – and an eventual stabilization of broader macro-economic conditions – to solidify its position as more than just an oft-cited alternative for VMware customers looking to get out from under Broadcom’s thumb.

Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami during the vendor’s recent .NEXT event noted that just five years ago, Nutanix was “an HCI company,” with many customers “using us for their initial workloads” like virtual computing services. “And we continue to own that HCI platform to be able to handle all the workloads that they run, and largely we can do that today,” he added.

But, since Ramaswami’s contentious move from VMware, Nutanix has evolved to helping customers operate in multiple public clouds, “and so we focused on evolving from this pure HCI company to a hybrid-cloud company working across [Amazon Web Services], Azure, and Google,” Ramaswami said. “And that lined up with where we felt our customers were going.”

That approach has proven lucrative for Nutanix, which despite a slight stumble heading into its more recent fiscal year, has seen robust growth. Sure, some of that has come from the vendor’s ability to lure thousands of VMware users, but Ramaswami said Nutanix is also growing business due to an increased focus on platform.

“This whole notion of external storage was not something we were doing. But, again, we saw an opportunity to do that given what is happening in the industry,” Ramaswami said of this focus. “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 were an opportunity there. The 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 are much more friendly and synergistic compared to Broadcom. So we took the opportunity there, and again, it was really to help our customers that we went after this external storage opportunity. ... And now we are looking at where our customers are going.”

Ramaswami explained that Nutanix sees customers over the next few years wanting to evolve their internal process to take advantage of “modern cloud-native applications and AI.”

“They're building and running modern applications, they're looking at inferencing workloads, they're looking at agentic AI use cases, and we take the platform forward to help them. So that’s the next seven years of mechanics,” Ramaswami said. “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.”

Will Nutanix move up the stack?

Ramaswami also hinted that this evolution could lead Nutanix further up the platform stack, noting that while it’s squarely a player in the middleware space, the vendor’s own recent evolution could lead to other layered opportunities.

“If you would have asked me a few years ago, I wouldn't think we would be able to play in platform services, and now we are gradually getting up into this notion of being able to provide platform services,” Ramaswami said. “By no means would I call ourselves sort of focusing on an app developer, like an Atlassian or somebody like that very squarely focused on the developer community. … That's not us today, yet. We are certainly the middleware, and we're getting closer and closer there. So, this is one that we think about, and honestly, I think we'll have to see where we put us.”

Ramaswami noted that this would not be an easy move as “it's not just a mindset. It's different in terms of the products that you need to build. It's different from the community that you need to call out from a sales perspective as well. So it's something that we need to think through and execute very carefully on.

“Right now … we are playing around with it at that level, like we are not in there by no means, and we frankly got a lot to do, and it's also a matter of prioritization for us as a company. … There is a lot for us to do here and execute on over the next few years.” Ramaswami continued. “If you ask me, do I think today that we're going to be an app-focused company in two to three years, it’s hard for me to say, but is it out of realm? It's still the possibilities, for sure, it's something to be thinking on.”

Macro-economic challenges

In looking ahead, Ramaswami more certainly brushed past immediate macro-operating conditions, with the biggest being ongoing supply chain constraints that CFO Rukmini Sivaraman recently said the vendor expects to continue through at least its current fiscal year.

Equity research firm William Blair in a recent Nutanix report coming out of the .NEXT event did point to what it termed “solid growth prospects” for Nutanix, though “tempered by recent supply chain headwinds and a slower-than-expected VMware displacement opportunity.” It also cited risks, including “competition from three-tier storage architectures, workload migration to the public cloud, potential macro-economic pressures impacting IT spending, and component cost inflation impacting server pricing and availability.”

Ramaswami’s approach toward these challenges was highlighted by Nutanix forgoing a business outlook forecast through 2028 and instead pointing to forecasts for its fiscal 2029, when it expects to be hitting revenue target growth of mid- to high-teen percentages.

“We all know today that we live in this world of geopolitical uncertainty and supply chain assumptions, and so it's very hard for us to predict what's going to actually happen tomorrow or the day after … because these things are changing dynamically,” Ramaswami said of that approach. “So we took a step back for our investor day and said, ‘let's take a medium-term outlook where we expect some of these things get normalized. Your supply chain gets normalized. Maybe the geopolitical situation gets a bit more stable, or at least we know what it's like, and then address what is the opportunity that we can actually pursue with the platforms that we bring to the market, the partner ecosystem that we have built, and the go-to-market acceleration that we've done.’”