Nutanix continued to snatch its fair share of disgruntled VMware customers, momentum that it expects to continue over the next several years while also looking to tap into new market opportunities bolstered by reinvestment plans tied to recent job cuts.

Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said the vendor added 3,000 new customers during its recently concluded 2026 fiscal year, its third year in a row in hitting that mark, adding that while the company “felt good about it” the gain was not a specific company goal.

“We don’t have a goal so say we want this many customers,” Ramaswami said during a question-and-answer session with a handful of media following Nutanix’s fourth quarter and full-year 2026 earnings call. “It’s whatever shows up and sometimes there’ll be fewer customers with larger deals with them and other times it’s going to be smaller customers. So, we’re not trying to optimize for a customer number.”

Ramaswami did explain that VMware continues to be a “steady and climbing” source of those customer wins and that “there’s a lot of migration still a lot of migration to be done over the next five years.”

“We have roughly, what, about 31, 32,000 customers roughly in the Nutanix family today. VMware has well over 100 [thousand], so you know you can call it roughly maybe 200,000 customers. So there's still a lot of customers that haven’t been migrated,” Ramaswami said. “But if you look at the sentiment … I think most customers would probably say they want to migrate over time and that's really what I think other third-party analysts have said.”

Ramaswami did note that while migrations continue at a good clip, the pace of those moves remains fluid due to non-technical reasons.

“I think we are in a good position when it comes to customers looking to migrate off of VMware, and that continues to be the case. I would argue that we are perhaps the best option and the easiest option to migrate for a VMware customer in terms of a like-for-like easy application that I mean, easy migration that doesn't impact application teams or the application whatsoever, whether they want to migrate to us [on-premises] or whether they want to migrate to us in the public cloud,” Ramaswami said of Nutanix’s position to gain from those moves, adding that this includes the vendor’s push to automate as much of the processes as possible.

“So I think we have the formula. I think it's more working with the customer to make sure that they are ready to do the migration, they're ready to take steps that we work together with them on ensuring that there's a good ROI for them as they go through this process, and also overcoming, perhaps I would say, inertia,” Ramaswami added. “I mean, VMware works. It works there, and so it's all of those that come into play in terms of the migration aspect as opposed to it's not a technology limiting factor.”

Job cut savings reinvested

Ramaswami also reinforced Nutanix’s previous insight into recent plans for cutting 5% of its workforce as part of a broader “business structure” review, a move that will cost the vendor up to $43 million. Nutanix CFO Rukmini Sivaraman during the earnings call added that the vendor expects to pay up to $35 million of that amount in cash during the first fiscal quarter of 2027, which ends October 31.

Ramaswami said Nutanix would look to reinvest savings from those job cuts into growth opportunities. These include its AI stack, which has been central to many of the vendor’s more recent product launches, and its go-to-market partner organizations “because we do believe again we have a lot of opportunity to capture and let's go put more features on the ground to be able to go capture that opportunity.”

Nutanix’s recent deal with neocloud ChronoScale Holdings highlighted that opportunity, with Ramaswami telling investors during the earnings call that the deal “represents some early success for us in this market.”

"We are talking to a number of other neoclouds," Ramaswami said. "We have a good solution for those neoclouds that don't have the ability to go develop all the software stack by themselves, which there's going to be plenty. There's a lot of neoclouds who are really largely coming in from owning real estate and owning data centers to wanting to provide these services, and we believe we can help them with that."

Ramaswami also pointing toward the digital sovereignty market as a potential area of growth for the vendor.

“We are investing, for example, in being able to support our customers with support staff in region only without ever having to go follow a 24-hour clock around the world, because people want [it],” Ramaswami said, adding “there are many elements of sovereignty that we are investing in at this point.”

Channel progress

Nutanix is also starting to see some inertia of its own in gaining new customers through alternative channels. Ramaswami pointed to the vendor’s growing support for external storage solutions from partners like Dell Technologies, Everpure, and NetApp that posted a “significant uptick” during the last quarter of its fiscal 2026.

“While the percentage is small, we expect very rapid growth this fiscal year for us with all of those storage” vendors, Ramaswami said.

While those storage deals garnered applause, Ramaswami did seem to indicate that Nutanix wants to see more support from its traditional channel partners in how they embrace the vendor’s growing connection to public cloud-based services.

“My take is the public cloud is not new. Channel partners need to embrace it, and we again go through our channel every time, even if whether it's public cloud or [on-premises], it's the same license, it's the same stack that we sell. The customer can deploy it [on-premises] or deploy it in the public cloud. We don't limit them, so our channel partners are part of the equation,” Ramaswami said. “But what I would encourage the channel partners to do … is to proactively have those conversations with the customer because the customer is going to go find public cloud as an option and they're going to do it with or without the involvement of the channel partner. So I would urge them to get up to speed in terms of what's possible in the public cloud. How they can help their customer, especially in this world where buying [on-premises] hardware is difficult and expensive.”

Nutanix earlier this year announced plans to join many of its rivals in updating its go-to-market partner program, moves that updated service offerings and take advantage of broader market uncertainty tied to how some vendors – read: Broadcom – have upended the channel partner ecosystem.

Ramaswami did acknowledge that customers were being challenged to manage set infrastructure budgets squeezed by surging hardware prices that “makes it harder for them to buy the hardware necessary to run our software,” but later added that the hardware squeeze did not impact the pricing on Nutanix’s software-based offerings.

“We've been pricing our software as usual, as normal. We haven't seen any significant kind of movement one way or the other,” Ramaswami said, adding that, “the customers are paying more for the hardware at this point, much more so than they were before.”