Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey says networking and security are “immense” opportunities for the hyperconverged infrastructure company as its customers move to hybrid cloud environments.

“One thing we hear a lot from our large customers is that hybrid cloud’s biggest weakness is networking,” he said in an interview with SDxCentral following Nutanix’s fourth quarter fiscal 2018 earnings call. “The public cloud is relatively flat and simplistic while on prem is extremely complex and hierarchical. There’s an immense opportunity for us to innovate in the area of networking and security.”

In May, Nutanix added a new SDN tool called Flow to its software stack that provides microsegmentation, network automation, and visualization capabilities. When asked if he’s referring to Flow, Pandey said, “Flow and putting a lot of Flow into Kubernetes and containers. It’s going to be impossible for people to just spin up containers without any kind of governance around networking and security. Bringing the goodness you build for VMs into containers — that’s a pretty good thing.”

Panday has been focusing heavily on hybrid cloud and container support for the past year. During the company’s fiscal fourth quarter of 2017 earnings call he said, “Calm, Xi, and Kubernetes containers form the trifecta of our product strategy for the next several years.”

Calm provides application automation and lifecycle management across public clouds and Nutanix-powered private clouds. Xi is the company’s cloud services. The first Xi service — disaster recovery — is scheduled to launch at the end of this year.

And in a May interview with SDxCentral, Pandey said his goal is to “hybridize containers and VMs” using software including Calm and Flow.

Looking ahead, Pandey said he’s focused on Xi, which recently started an early access program for some customers. “We hope to make this year into the year of Xi,” he said.

While Nutanix’s fourth-quarter earnings beat Wall Street’s estimates, the company also forecast a wider than expected loss for the fiscal first quarter as it phases out hardware sales and transitions to a software-only model. Nutanix’s shares fell 4.6 percent in after-hours trading on Thursday.

The company posted revenue of $303.7 million, up from $252.5 million in the fiscal fourth quarter of 2017. Looking ahead to its first fisacal quarter of 2019, Nutanix expects an adjusted loss of $0.26 to $0.28 per share on revenue of $295 million to $310 million.

Pandey remained upbeat on the call with investors touting the company’s customer wins. Nutanix ended its most recent quarter with 10,610 customers, adding 1,000 during that time frame. “We added nearly as many customers as we had when we IPO'd,” he said.

The company also closed a $20-plus million deal with an existing customer in the quarter — the largest in Nutanix history.

Pandey pledged to continue to develop new products that “delight people,” and cited Frame as an example of such a product. Nutanix acquired the cloud-based desktop virtualization product earlier this month. “Frame currently operates in a $3 billion market and we think we can grow this market with our focus on instant delivery and end-user delay,” Pandey said.

Another platform is Files, which is its software-defined storage offering that Pandey said is “the fastest growing product in the history of this company.” He didn’t provide a Files customer count to SDxCentral but said the company will release metrics in the future.