Nutanix recently saw its stock price plunge on short-term revenue concerns tied to lingering VMware customer migration opportunities, but its CFO remains confident in the vendor’s financial picture and even hinted at the potential for an acquisition.

Rukmini Sivaraman, during an online interview at the recent Needham Growth Conference, admitted that Nutanix’s most recent quarter “didn’t go as we’d expected from a revenue perspective,” and that the vendor’s attempt to “articulate kind of what happened within the business and what it means going forward … led to sort of the dislocation, I think, in the stock price that we saw.”

That “dislocation” was an immediate 17% drop in Nutanix’s stock price after it released disappointing earnings results for its first fiscal quarter of 2026 in late November, a drop that it did somewhat claw back in the ensuing weeks but momentum it has since lost.

Nutanix at that time blamed the revenue shortfall on the timing of when the full revenue benefit from new deals start hitting its books. That timing has been pushed back to later in the year or could even spill into next year, which was later than initially forecast.

CEO Rajiv Ramaswami at that time linked the delay to customers Nutanix was stealing from rivals needing “flexibility” in terms of when those new deals began, a link echoed by Sivaraman.

“A lot of it is when we think about customers migrating over from Broadcom onto the Nutanix platform, especially, in some of the larger customers that can take time, meaning it's not done over a quarter,” Sivaraman said. “We've given examples in the past where, for a large financial institution that was based in the U.S., it took them a year to fully complete the migration.”

Sivaraman said those instances can result in a customer asking to take on licenses “over time.”

“Think of it as sort of a basic ramp structure where they may say, ‘give me a few right away, some maybe next quarter, and maybe the rest a quarter from then, two quarters from now,’” Sivaraman explained. “So that then means that our revenues aligned with when we provision those licenses to the customer, because that's our revenue obligation, and that's what we mean by deals with future start dates.”

Sivaraman also noted that there has been some revenue lag tied to hardware constraints, which was something Nutanix was hearing about anecdotally during its most recent quarter.

“We're a software company, so we don't have direct visibility into hardware or server lead times and things like that, but right now, I think folks widely understand this industry wide tightness around memory, DRAM, and supply, I think, has been well documented,” Sivaraman said. “We've also heard some tightness with CPUs. It's still too early to draw conclusions about how the broader server lead time dynamic may evolve, and of course, we're monitoring that pretty closely.”

Acquisition opportunity?

Despite this fiscal uncertainty, Sivaraman said that Nutanix continues to sit on a sufficient cash reserve to help fund the vendor’s recent share buyback program and could be used toward a potential acquisition.

“We continue to be on the lookout, as I think any company should, for interesting assets in the market that can augment our existing sort of strategy and maybe help us accelerate our roadmap,” Sivaraman said of that strategy.

Sivaraman specifically pointed to Nutanix’s D2iQ purchase in early 2024, which infused Nutanix with a long-standing Kubernetes player and led to the launch of Nutanix’s Kubernetes Platform.

“That really allowed us … to accelerate our cloud-native efforts,” Sivaraman said. “Our Nutanix Kubernetes platform … really has its seeds in that acquisition. We had some capabilities, we were able to combine it with theirs and accelerate our roadmap and get that solution very quickly to market. So things like that, we’ll continue to be on the on the lookout for as ways for us to tuck in acquisitions that really are accretive to the overall roadmap and to the overall go-to-market.”