No one likes remote learning — not teachers, not students, and definitely not parents — and it’s especially tough with a Zoom room full of early-elementary school kids. Twins make it doubly difficult, and Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey knows this from personal experience. Two of his kids are 6 years old.

“They just started first grade, and imagine the first grade all happening on Zoom,” he said during an interview at virtual Nutanix .NEXT. “It’s pretty extraordinary stuff. This pandemic is also a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” he said, adding that when he looks back at this time decades from now he wants to say “I did the right thing at the right time.”

For Pandey, this means leaving the company he co-founded in 2009. In a surprise move ahead of Nutanix’s earnings call last month, Pandey announced that he will stay on until the board of directors selects his successor.

“Being at home for the last six months, and thinking hard about what really matters, I need to commit to my family for at least the next year while we are still in this lockdown,” he told SDxCentral.

While all of this may very well be true, at least one industry analyst says Nutanix needs a new strategy and that won’t happen without change at the top.

‘Nutanix Needs Change’

“A few year ago, they decided to take on VMware in the hypervisor business. That made them public enemy No. 1 for VMware,” said Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research. “At the same time, Dell was getting their hyperconverged strategy going.”

Dell Technologies owns 81% of VMware, and the parent company’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) strategy largely centers on co-developing and tightly integrating its servers with VMware’s HCI software stack.

“While there’s still a lot of VMware on Nutanix, a lot of that business flowed Dell’s way,” Kerravala said. “[Nutanix] decided to take on VMware in VMware’s core area of strength, and that didn’t work out well for them.”

And, he added, “the company is horrifically late to cloud.”

At this point all of the major IT infrastructure vendors including Dell, Cisco, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have cloud strategies and partnerships. In fact, top Nutanix rival VMware launched its hybrid-cloud service with Amazon Web Services (AWS) three years ago and also boasts partnerships with all of the major cloud providers including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM, Oracle Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud. Meanwhile, Nutanix’s just announced its AWS partnership last month, and Azure yesterday.

“So, Panday might be stepping down to spend more time with his kids, but a CEO change is needed,” Kerravala said.

Pandey’s ‘Monomaniacal Nutanix Marathon’

Pandey, for his part, admitted that while the COVID-19 pandemic put things in perspective, he had been thinking about stepping down for a while. “Eleven years of non-stop, monomaniacal marathon,” he said, about his tenure as CEO. He wanted to leave on a high note, and the recent $750 million investment from Bain Capital that sent Nutanix shares soaring coupled with fourth-quarter earnings that capped a strong end to fiscal 2020 fit the bill. “There’s no real definite timeline,” he said. “But I wanted to make a public announcement and cast a wide-enough net to find the next-generation leader this company while I take a step back and just take a breather. That’s where everything boiled down.”

Pandey said it’s too early to call it a permanent retirement. But for now, “I am going to focus on my three children,” he said. “They’re all very young. The eldest is not even 10, and they’re all Zooming to class. So I’m just focusing on them for now, and then it will be an exercise in self-discovery.”

Pandey will help select the company’s second CEO, which he described as passing the baton. “You have to look the next runner in a relay race in the eye, and you have to run together so the baton doesn’t fall,” he said.

While he’s won’t rule out promoting someone internally, “if you were to wager a guess, my guess would be that we’re going to look externally.”

Wanted: Hyperscaler, Hybrid-Cloud Cred

And hyperscale experience tops the list of job requirements. “Someone who is really going to think of the next three to five years in a way that looks like an infinite game with the hyperscalers and understand that you can go and build solutions that are highly competitive — things that resonate well in this hybrid-cloud world.”

Additionally, Pandey said his replacement requires a strong understanding of Nutanix’s subscription-based business model.

On the Q4 earnings call, Nutanix executives said that the company’s ongoing transition to a software subscription-based business fueled consistent growth amid the COVID-19 crisis. CFO Duston Williams said that transition is “nearly complete,” adding that 88% of billings for the quarter came from subscriptions, which grew 29% from the year-ago period to $341 million.

And despite the strong focus on hyperscalers and hybrid cloud — Pandey likes to say that HCI stands for “hybrid-cloud infrastructure,” and he announced a hybrid cloud partnership with Microsoft Azure during his opening .NEXT keynote yesterday. The other HCI, hyperconverged infrastructure, isn’t going away, Pandey said.

“Just like iOS never really became less relevant to Apple,” he said, adding that despite that company’s pivot to a subscription company with iTunes, and App Store, Apple Music, and Apple TV, the operating system remains its core foundation. “So for us, it’s very important that the core operating system doesn’t get diminished. If anything, it becomes even more API centric, more portable, and more mobile.”

Sometimes the Platform, Sometimes the App

As Nutanix’s HCI stack moves from on-premises data centers to the public cloud, its software stack becomes an app running on top of the public cloud platforms, Pandey added.

“This journey is extremely fungible and interchangeable,” he said. “Sometimes we are the platform and sometimes we are the app.” Pandey points to Microsoft and its shift in strategy under CEO Satya Nadella that saw Microsoft Office running on top of competitors’ platforms. “The same thing is happening with Azure running Linux, and most of Microsoft’s apps are now running on Linux. We want to provide a similar kind of, not just choice, but vulnerability to our customers saying look, we are not going to force you to pay a strategy tax.”

This so-called “strategy tax” is a dig at rival VMware and its software licensing costs, which Paney has long railed against in blogs and on Twitter. To this end, Nutanix’s hybrid cloud services with AWS and Azure lets customers port their licenses to the cloud.

“Our goal is to keep this experience across on prem and off prem the best in the world,” Pandey said. “Facebook didn’t have to own the mobile operating system for it to be a platform. By just having a great engagement, whether it’s Android or iOS, Facebook is still a platform. We need to create that experience with our control planes, our single pane of glass, and the fact that we provide a similar skill set for the IT world out there. So that’s the real promise.”