To expand its growth in the hybrid cloud and hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) markets, Nutanix is forming a global strategic partnership with Cisco, continues to compete with VMware and moves into artificial intelligence (AI) support with its GPT-in-a-Box launch.

The Nutanix and Cisco partnership allows the networking giant to sell a bundled solution that blends Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) hardware with the Nutanix Cloud Platform software. Nutanix President and CEO Rajiv Ramaswami expects this partnership to help the vendor reach a far larger addressable market.

Cisco will combine its UCS servers, Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) networking and security capabilities, and management from UCS Manager and Intersight with the Nutanix Cloud Platform software.

The bundle offers flexible deployment options with support for Cisco UCS rack and blade servers, including initial support for Cisco UCS C-Series Servers and future plans to extend to UCS X-Series.

“Our cloud software offering, along with their hardware, their networking, their security, their computer hardware, all put together by Cisco [as a] fully integrated solution sold by their sellers, ” Ramaswami told a small group of press after the company’s Q4 2023 earnings call.

He added this integrated solution addresses customers’ both hardware and software needs for data centers. “So, customers can buy pretty much everything they need for the data center from Cisco.”

Nutanix currently has about 25,000 customers, but its addressable market is at least 100,000 customers, the company reports. “The fact is Cisco has a go-to-market machine that’s much bigger than ours,” Ramaswami said during the earnings call. “Cisco’s broad market reach could help us get those initial entries.”

The Cisco partnership will strengthen Nutanix's competitive positioning in the hybrid cloud and HCI market. The company also continues to see customer engagement related to potential concerns around Broadcom's pending VMware acquisition.

“We continue to see significant engagement and opportunities related to potential concerns around that transaction,” Ramaswami said, including a seven-figure annual contract value (ACV) deal in the fourth fiscal quarter with a Fortune 100 company that “decided to do more with us given their concerns on VMware.”

However, “we haven't seen a sea change in terms of deals flowing in yet,” he said.

Earlier this year, Nutanix launched the GPT-in-a-Box, aiming to simplify the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) implementation.

The bundle adds generative AI applications and foundation models to Nutanix’s HCI and other services, integrating Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure platform, Files Storage and Objects Storage solutions, AHV hypervisor and Kubernetes with Nvidia GPU acceleration. It supports a range of large language models (LLMs) including Llama2, Falcon and MPT, the vendor claims.

Ramaswami said that the vendor already saw customers’ initial interest in this service.

“This is a full stack, software-defined AI-ready platform along with services to help our customers size and configure hardware and software to deploy a curated set of LLMs using the leading open source AI frameworks on our platform,” he said. “It allows customers to easily deploy AI-ready infrastructure to fine-tune and run generative pre-trained transformers or GPTs, while maintaining control of their data and applications.”

Ramaswami said the service is mostly for customers that use foundation models that are available but not building their own LLMs. “Most customers in the enterprise, I don’t think will develop their own models, but use what’s available out there. They would probably fine-tune it with the data that they have.”