LONDON - Nutanix used the British leg of its global .NEXT tour to continue putting the pressure on VMware. And with good reason: the brand snapped up some 640 VMware customers in the last quarter alone.

The sales pitch at the London edition of its roadshow sought to help push that number even higher, touting the simplicity of switching, making it almost sound too easy. One customer – Paul Stratton, the CIO of Day Lewis Pharmacy – described the process as simply “click and then go make a coffee.”

But while the burgeoning brand’s image may have been dramatically displayed at the event via a swirling light show, the reality behind the scenes paints a somewhat different picture.

Earlier in the week, Nutanix's latest earnings revealed that migrations might take a bit longer than brewing a pot, with CEO Rajiv Ramaswami admitting some customers are stuck in “deeply embedded VMware integrations” that require flexibility on contract timing.

The result? A 17% stock plunge and revenues pushed into future quarters.

The next day in London, Nutanix chief revenue officer Andrew Brinded sought to paint a more positive picture, coaching potential customers on the real complexity of total cost of ownership calculations.

“One of the mistakes I think some people have made is that they just look at the software without looking at the broader total cost of ownership. We're happy to help you with that,” he said. “When you're looking at moving from three-tier onto Nutanix, moving workloads in public cloud over, or running Nutanix in the public cloud, we can show you a cost model that shows that over a period of time, typically over five years, you'll get a really good TCO.”

Nutanix used its London event to directly counter VMware, with the repeated theme of putting customer needs first, a frankly stark alternative to the lawsuits and price hikes some of its competitors’ clients have seen in recent months – not that Broadcom seems to care, considering more than 90% its 10,000 largest customers have signed up to revised licenses.

Speakers from firms including Renesas Electronics, Norsk Global, and the University of Reading all repeated the same thing: they’ve moved workloads and services of varying sizes and complexities from VMware to Nutanix in recent years.

And more may yet join when they hear Nutanix is looking to “do the opposite” of Broadcom VMware with regards to price.

CRO Brinded outlined the company’s pricing structure during a press junket, confirming its pledge to “not to exceed” renewal pricing guarantees.

“When I go around the world, companies are worried in terms of Broadcom's future, regarding R&D investment, regarding support, and regarding price,” he told journalists, including SDxCentral, at the London press conference. “And so we're trying to do the opposite of that.”

“We're telling a story about R&D that says you can do VMs, you can do containers, you can do multi-cloud, you can do all that from the same platform. And now we're talking much more about AI from the support side,” Brinded said. “On pricing, [it’s] just making sure people have got that transparency. We feel that's coming in the opposite spirit to some things that are going on in the industry.”

But scaling up presents its own problems. Nutanix has consistently added several hundred new customers per quarter, reaching nearly 30,000 total – a far cry from the almost 4,000 when Brinded joined the firm back in 2017.

As its rival falters, the CRO acknowledged the company is eyeing a much larger prize.

“We still have 170,000 to get to,” he said, in reference to the total addressable market of VMware customers who may just be looking for a switch.

The question hanging over that ambition: When will Nutanix start seeing four-figure customer additions in a single quarter?

When pressed by SDxCentral, Brinded said the company doesn't project new logo numbers, but offered a revealing explanation for why more explosive growth may still be years away.

“We have been consistent in adding new logos to our business," he said. “If you look at what a lot of customers have done, they moved on to VCF with Broadcom; that will be a multi-year engagement, depending on how long they've done those enterprise license agreements for. Customers may need to make a decision in those next few years.”

He then walked through the limited options facing VMware customers when those contracts come up for renewal: going all-in on public cloud, shifting entirely to containers, trying Red Hat virtualization, exploring Microsoft's options, or choosing Nutanix.

“Neither of those are very realistic,” he said of the first two paths, noting how few large enterprises have gone 100% public cloud or fully containerized. As for Red Hat virtualization? Brinded added: “I'm not sure how many enterprise customer stories there are out there that's doing that.”

So while Nutanix is consistent at attracting new customers, its London event showed the firm is playing a waiting game, betting that when those VCF contracts expire, it will be the most viable alternative standing.