Nutanix posted earnings and revenue beats during the third quarter of fiscal 2021, and on a conference call with investors CEO Rajiv Ramaswami touted his company’s “healthy, year-over-year increase in our win rate against our largest competitor.”

Ramaswami didn’t name that competitor, but he’s talking about VMware, where he served as a COO before moving over to Nutanix’s chief executive post in December.

Also on the earnings call, Ramaswami said Nutanix cut its global headcount by about 2.5 percent, primarily sales and marketing jobs, as it continues its transition to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) and subscription business model. “We expect this action to yield approximately $50 million in annual savings,” he said.

SDxCentral caught up with Ramaswami after the call with investors, and he discussed the layoffs at Nutanix and the competitive landscape. “We had a good quarter, a strong quarter, another quarter with good execution, momentum,” he said in a phone interview. “We continue to add customers, while at the same time maintaining the very high level of satisfaction, even as we scale with our customers.”

Nutanix outperformed across all of its metrics for the third consecutive quarter, Ramaswami said. During Q3, the company grew its annual contract value (ACV) billings 18%, to $159.9 million, compared to the third quarter of fiscal 2020, and increased its run-rate ACV 25% to $1.45 billion.

Nutanix also increased revenues by 8% year over year to $344.5 million and ended the third quarter of fiscal 2021 with about 19,430 end customers.

The layoffs affected about 150 employees, Ramaswami told SDxCentral, and they happened in sales and marketing positions where Nutanix saw excess coverage and overlapping functions. The headcount reduction allows Nutanix to “focus on building our renewals engine,” he said. “It’s a one-time opportunity to gain some efficiencies while continuing the execution that we’ve already had,” he said.

And while he declined to provide specific numbers around Nutanix’s win-rate against VMware, Ramaswami said this success also points to Nutanix’s strong execution in its ability to sell its core hyperconverged and cloud software stack as well as some its newer products on top. “Our vision is evolving to make clouds invisible,” he said.

This vision started in the data center, with its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software for compute, storage, and networking. “And now, that same simplicity and ease of use, and the TCO benefits that we provided there, we see the opportunity to provide that across multiple clouds,” Ramaswami said.

Of course, this sounds very similar to VMware’s incoming CEO Raghu Raghuram, who, on that company’s earnings call this week, said he plans to turbo charge VMware’s multicloud push.

Ramaswami said that Nutanix’s simplicity sets it apart. “And, again, ultimately we provide the freedom of choice,” he added. This is a key differentiator for Nutanix, which, unlike other HCI software vendors, supports its own AHV hypervisor as well as VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix Hypervisor. Plus, customers can run Nutanix software on their hardware of choice, and it’s expanding public cloud infrastructure partners as well.

Customers “just buy our software, one license, and that software can be deployed wherever they want,” Ramaswami said. “They can deploy it on prem, they can deploy it in the public cloud, there’s no need to buy different offerings. It’s all one offer, and the license is completely portable.”

This includes Nutanix Clusters on AWS, which allows customers to run Nutanix’s software stack in Amazon Web Services and move their workloads between the public cloud and on-premises data centers without having to retool any code. Nutanix is also jointly developing a similar hybrid-cloud service with Microsoft Azure and plans to roll that out later this year, Ramaswami said. “Then, over time, we’ll look at other providers, but I think our focus right now is on scaling the AWS offering and getting the Azure offering out,” he said.

Also during the quarter, Nutanix introduced Microsoft Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters running on Nutanix HCI. This allows customers to manage and govern their on-premises Kubernetes clusters, deployed with Nutanix Karbon, alongside their Azure resources through the common control plane provided by Azure Arc. “So this is a hybrid use case of customers running modern containerized workloads on prem in Azure, and they can now use Azure Arc to manage both,” Ramaswami said.

In addition to its core software stack, Nutanix saw continued momentum in its emerging products, Ramaswami said. New annual contract value from emerging products increased 80% year over year. This includes Nutanix’s Era database management software as well as its file, object, and block storage, which comes with built-in ransomware protection.