Nutanix wants to be the Airbnb of hybrid cloud. To this end, the software vendor is working to strengthen its ecosystem partnerships with Red Hat and Citrix and extend its cloud stack from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Microsoft Azure and other public clouds. 

“What we are is a hybrid, multicloud platform company with security built in,” Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami told SDxCentral in an interview after the company's first-quarter 2022 earnings call. “In some ways, we are like an Airbnb here. We have a platform, customers can come to our platform and use it and run in any cloud they want. And if you're a cloud provider, you can come to us, use our platform and go capture those enterprise customer workloads.”

Ramaswami has been pushing the this theme since he became CEO earlier this year. Reflecting on this “unquestionably gratifying” journey, he noted the company “made significant progress on its strategic partnerships, signing new or expanded agreements with Red Hat, Lenovo, HPE, and Citrix.”

Nutanix announced the partnership with Red Hat in July, which designates both as “preferred” platforms to the other. This means Nutanix’s platform supports Red Hat’s OpenShift and Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platforms. In turn, Red Hat’s OpenShift and RHEL are certified to run on Nutanix’s platform including its Acropolis Operating System (AOS) and AHV hypervisor.

The partnership saw “good momentum in the first quarter, which is really our first full quarter of the strategic partnership,” Ramaswami said during the earnings call. “It's resulted in wins for both Red Hat Linux running on top of the Nutanix Cloud Platform as well as OpenShift on the Nutanix Cloud Platform.” 

The company also announced plans to extend its partnership with Citrix at this year’s .Next event. The move combines the Nutanix cloud stack with Citrix virtual apps and desktop services to services for remote and distributed workforces that can be deployed across private and public clouds. 

Gartner named Nutanix as a “leader” in this year’s Magic Quadrant for hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software for the fifth time in a row. 

Analysts recognized high customer satisfaction with the breadth and depth of Nutanix’s HCI software and its unified platform for multiple workloads and data services. However, they also called out Nutanix Clusters, the vendor's public cloud product, which has seen modest customer traction and it is currently only available in AWS.

Nutanix plans to expand its platform to Microsoft Azure soon, which is driven by “strong customer interests.” The company has not revealed a general availability date yet, “but we are well along the journey, we are jointly developing the offering with Microsoft’s bare metal,” Ramaswami told SDxCentral.

In addition to these top cloud partnerships, Nutanix plans to offer more cloud-provider choices in the future. But “right now from the public-cloud perspective, we are focused on scaling the AWS offering and bringing the Azure offer to the market,” Ramaswami added.

Before taking over as Nutanix’s CEO, Ramaswami served as a COO at VMware — Nutanix’s chief competitor and the other “leader” in Gartner's HCI report.

Nutanix and VMware both partner with Dell Technologies on HCI products. While VMware and Dell completed their spinoff deal earlier this month, the companies agreed to continue the successful HCI partnership. 

The spinoff hasn't affected Nutanix's business, Ramaswami said. “At this point, really no change in the competitive landscape,” he added. “We continue to see a higher win ratio for us perhaps because our pipeline discipline has gone better, and we are much more disciplined in terms of our execution.”

Nutanix reported a strong first fiscal quarter of 2022 and exceeded all of its guided metrics. The vendor benefited from strong demand driven by the acceleration of digital transformation, data center modernization, and hybrid multicloud operating model shift, Ramaswami said during the company’s earnings call.

The vendor reported its highest growth rate in more than three years with a 21% year-over-year revenue increase to $378.5 million. And its annual contract value (ACV) billings reached $183 million, which represents 33% year-over-year growth.

Looking ahead to the second quarter, Nutanix executives projected revenue in the range of $400 million to $410 million, and ACV billings between $195 million and $200 million.

For the full fiscal year, the company guided for revenue of $1.615 billion to $1.630 billion and ACV billings of $740 million to $750 million, representing 25% to 26% year-over-year growth.