Nutanix reported 11% growth in both revenue and billings for its third quarter of fiscal 2020. This followed a particularly dour outlook on its Q2 earnings call that projected a big hit from the coronavirus pandemic.

It turns out that hit didn’t quite happen in Q3, and while other tech companies’ revenues have been hammered by the economic impacts of COVID-19, Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey said he was “pleased with our Q3 performance despite challenging market conditions. Our final results came in modestly ahead of the preliminary ranges we pre-announced several weeks ago.”

For the quarter ending April 30, Nutanix posted $318.3 million in total revenue, which was up 11% year over year. Nutanix Q3 billings topped $383.5 million, also up 11% compared to the third quarter of fiscal 2019.

Meanwhile, as the company continues its transition to a software subscription-based business model, Nutanix reported software and support revenue grew 18% year over year to $314.5 million. And software and support billings increased 17% during the same time to $379.7 million. During the third quarter, 84% of the company’s billings came from software subscriptions.

Pandey credited the double-digit growth to strong demand for “zero-touch” IT brought on by the newly remote global workforce. The company’s virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), operating system, AHV hypervisor with automation, Xi cloud services such as Leap disaster recovery, software-defined storage, and desktop-as-a-service “are the necessary pillars of our company’s IP strategy that has been in the works for several years before this pandemic,” Pandey said. “In many ways, this digital infrastructure is now the biggest reason why we found this discontinuity to be so much less painful than many other businesses into our customers.”

And he also said the company is “taking proactive steps” to cut expenses and “navigate through the pandemic and beyond.”

This includes two, non-consecutive, week-long furloughs for most Nutanix employees globally. “We also believe in sharing the burden across all levels of the organization and, as such, our executive team took a 10% reduction in salary, starting in April,” Pandey added.

Nutanix also cut travel and shifted to virtual sales meetings and events. “We have gone completely virtual, and I’ve seen comparable yield in terms of qualified leads and virtual meeting for our sales organization at less than half the cost,” Pandey said.

Despite growing its business during Q3, however, Nutanix executives did not provide any Q4 guidance.

Ten years ago, Nutanix got its start as a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) pioneer. And at the time, “we took a contrarian approach to bet on VDI is the killer app for scale out architecture within the data center,” Pandey said.

In 2018, Nutanix bought Frame, a cloud-based desktop virtualization company, for $165 million. And last year the vendor combined its VDI and desktop-as-a-service under one business unit. “Looking back, this pandemic has made us realize how critical that reconciliation has been between our digital HCI platform, supporting Citrix and VMware VDI, and our SaaS-based desktop service,” Pandey said, adding that the largest deal of the quarter, which totaled more than $7 million, involved these two key technologies.

Looking ahead, Pandey said HCI will become the “killer app” for moving workloads to the cloud. “We’ll make a strong case in the next three to five years for how HCI becomes a killer app for all things lift and shift, with no change to applications or operating systems, similar to virtualization 15 years ago,” he said on the earnings call.

Later, in an interview with SDxCentral, Pandey provided more details about how Nutanix’s HCI can help companies move to the cloud.

“As you look at the public cloud, the big issue right now is in the lift and shift, where we have to go and rewrite the applications,” he said. “And that’s where they become high-risk projects. So what we are actually going to do with Amazon and Azure is lean in and say look if you want to lift and shift you can just use the HCI on prem and you can use the exact same experience off prem as well.”

This means companies won’t need to refactor applications for public cloud and they also won’t need additional engineers to retool and migrate these workloads. “We’re talking about how you can lift and shift with one click,” Pandey said.

“Right now the enterprise has barely penetrated the public cloud,” he added. “They’re probably at 2% — maybe in the last two quarters up to 5%.” The way to make this move happen faster is “by saying lift and shift is easy. In the next three years, if the enterprise were to go to 25% [of workloads running in public clouds] the killer app for that would be HCI, as opposed to using a lot of people and a lot of engineers.”

It’s just like what VMware and virtualization did to bare-metal servers, he added. “The biggest value out of VMware back then was no change to apps, no change to operating systems. You have to have that exact same philosophy [for public cloud] for the next three to five years.”