Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami, six months into his new gig, has a handful of top priorities as he eyes a $61 billion market opportunity and charts a course to turn his company profitable sooner than Wall Street expected.

Making Nutanix more diverse is one of these, he said at the company’s investor day event this week.

“In the past, growing up as a startup, we had a good culture of diversity, but it was opportunistic,” he said. “Going forward, I look at diversity as a competitive advantage and a competitive differentiator for us. We want Nutanix to be a place where everybody can bring their true selves to work and be part of the mission.”

Later, in an interview with SDxCentral, he provided more detail and also admitted that Nutanix is “at the very beginning, early stages of our journey.”

Under Ramaswami’s leadership, Nutanix published its first environmental, social, and governance (ESG) report, and pledged to share the company’s progress annually in subsequent ESG reports. Ramaswami also formed an Executive Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council (DEI), which he leads.

Nutanix global workforce is 19.3% female and 80.6% male. In the United States, 54.1% of employees are white, 35.1% Asian, 5.7% Hispanic/LatinX, and 2.3% Black/African American, while 2% identify as multi-racial and 2.9% chose “other.”

“And it’s just the baseline,” Ramaswami said. “The first part is to acknowledge where we are, and we recognized that we’ve got more work to do.”

As Nutanix scales its business, focusing on diversity makes it a better place to work and will, he added. “You have people with different backgrounds, they bring different perspectives, and thoughts, and points of view to the table. And you generally end up with better decisions, and better outcomes.”

Before taking over as Nutanix’s CEO, Ramaswami served as a COO at VMware — Nutanix’s chief competitor.

Late last month, the company posted its most recent quarterly earnings and outperformed across all of its metrics. During the third quarter of fiscal 2021, Nutanix 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. It also boosted revenues by 8% year over year to $344.5 million and ended the quarter with about 19,430 end customers.

The company’s been on a multi-year journey to transition to a software subscription-based business model, and during its investor event this week, Ramaswami for the first time said Nutanix expects to be cash-flow positive by the second half of calendar 2022, which corresponds to the first half of fiscal 2023.

He also guided for 25% ACV billings growth through fiscal 2025, and forecast positive operating profit by the second half of fiscal 2023 or first half of fiscal 2024.

“Nutanix pioneered the hyperconverged infrastructure market, and we continue to be the market leader,” Ramaswami told investors, pointing to recent Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester Wave hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) reports.

However, almost a dozen year since it was founded, Nutanix is in a transition period as it focuses on growth and profitability, he added.

The HCI market will grow from $21 billion in 2020 to $30 billion in 2025, and this gives Nutanix room to grow its core business. “Essentially anything that can be virtualized on an x86 can be run well on an HCI platform, and that leaves plenty of opportunity for additional growth,” Ramaswami said.

But he also sees “substantial growth opportunity in adjacent markets.” This includes cloud-delivered desktops and databases, files and object storage, cloud management, disaster recovery, and hybrid cloud infrastructure, which represents an additional $31 billion market opportunity.

Nutanix’s shift to a subscription-based business will improve its profitability and its growth as customers renew their contracts, Ramaswami added. Contract renewals cost 80% compared to signing new customers, he explained, and they also give the sales team more time to focus on new customers. “Our renewal business is going at 50%, and then on top of that we can grow new business, too,” Ramaswami told SDxCentral.

In addition to renewals, Nutanix plans to scale its business and hybrid cloud platform through partnerships, Ramaswami said. He pointed to its original equipment manufacturing partnerships with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Lenovo, cloud partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure — “We are among the first to be using Azure bare metal service to deploy our cluster solution” — as well as virtual desktop integrations with Citrix and security integrations with Palo Alto Networks and Check Point.

“Our philosophy right now,” Ramaswami said, “is let’s build in whatever we can, and then partner with other best-of-breed providers.”