Hyperconverged infrastructure provider Nutanix reported a strong fiscal quarter for Q1 2024, riding on the opportunities from Broadcom’s VMware acquisition. Nutanix President and CEO Rajiv Ramaswami claims the vendor is “the easiest alternative” for VMware customers.

Nutanix reported a record quarterly revenue of $511 million, exceeding a $2 billion annualized run rate for the first time. This coupled with a 30% year-over-year growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) to $1.7 billion, according to Ramaswami.

He said in the earnings call that the Broadcom-VMware deal is “very relevant” to Nutanix. “Even this last quarter, we did close some additional deals that I would consider to be influenced by the Broadcom-VMware transaction.”

The G2K bank deal was one of the examples, he added. “It was a dual-vendor strategy, but going forward, it's going to be a single vendor strategy with us.”

Ramaswami notes that the VMware acquisition leads to increased concerns from existing VMware customers over pricing, customer support and innovation roadmap and business unit changes. It “is changing the relationship that customers are going to have with the company that they go forward, because Broadcom business model has been really to maximize the assets that they acquire there, they've said very publicly, that's what they're going to do with VMware as well.”

“For customers who are looking to reduce their risk, here we are a good alternative. We are in fact, probably the easiest alternative,” he told SDxCentral. “Even before all of this transpired, we've been doing a lot of work both interoperating with customers who are deploying VMware as well as converting VMware deployments over to Nutanix deployments.”

The vendor continues to expect some benefit from these influences of this deal and already factored that into its guidance for this fiscal year, Ramaswami said.

Nutanix is not the only company that is trying to capitalize on the VMware opportunity. For example, Red Hat recently entered the competition with the OpenShift virtualization technology.

On the other hand, Nutanix and Red Hat have a strong partnership. “From their perspective, as they compete against VMware on the application side, we compete with VMware on the infrastructure side,” Ramaswami said during the earnings call.

As customers are operating in the multicloud world, Nutanix and Red Hat provide a multicloud stack that addresses modern app development and underlying infrastructure needs, he added.

“For VMware customers, they could go to the public cloud [providers if] they want to go [cloud] native, or they could go to some combination of Nutanix plus Red Hat to run their historical VMware applications, the VM [virtual machine] applications or the Kubernetes applications on this combination,” Ramaswami said.

In addition to Red Hat, Nutanix is also forming a global strategic partnership with Cisco. The collaboration allows the networking giant to sell a bundled solution that blends Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) hardware with the Nutanix Cloud Platform software.

Ramaswami shared some “early progress” on the partnership. “This past quarter, our joint solution was made generally available to be sold by both sales forces. We also saw good customer interest and secured a few wins for this new offering, which were conversions of customers, who had previously been planning to purchase Cisco's HyperFlex.”

He added the pipeline takes six to nine months to close deals and the vendor expects to see growth for the next fiscal year and beyond.