The cloud continues to be cloudy and complex. And clarity into cloud operations are the mechanics that enterprise cloud companies aim to work more competently at. Cloud computing can get simpler, and Nutanix has been selling that resounding message pretty much from day one.
At the 2021 Nutanix .NEXT conference, where apart from making several announcements, CEO Rajiv Ramaswami, who joined Nutanix recently, just days after announcing he would leave his COO post at VMware, made his argument that public clouds can be extravagantly expensive places to run workloads unless they’re managed by Nutanix so they can be returned to another environment at an organisation’s convenience.
Lately, there’s been a lot of discussion around what is the right architecture for the cloud, what is the right cost model, and how an organisation should use the cloud in different ways.
Making his argument by referencing analysis from Andreessen Horowitz, Ramaswami made a case for reconsidering when and if to use hyperscale clouds, the importance of being able to repatriate workloads from the cloud when it makes sense to do so.
As a hybrid cloud platform that can run in many environments, Nutanix stands to benefit from repatriation – bringing IT in-house or taking advantage of different clouds.
Nutanix’s mission, Ramaswami reiterated, is to provide a simple, open hybrid multi-cloud software platform with rich data services to build, run, and manage any application. The company previously had 15 product offerings which have now been simplified into five key solutions.
Also Read: Nutanix emerges leader in HCI Vendors Ranking 2020
How it started
On September 23, 2019, Dheeraj Pandey and two friends, Mohit Aron and Ajeet Singh, launched Nutanix to mine the potential of distributed computing, with a vision to make managing IT infrastructure so simple that it becomes invisible — bringing together compute, storage, networking, and virtualisation in one invisible stack.
The business evolved from multi-hypervisor to multi-server to multi-cloud in over a decade.
By 2013, the company’s value passed the $1 billion mark. The company launched a successful IPO in 2016. And, today it’s one of the world’s top providers of software that is reinventing cloud computing.
Pandey, who retired last year, reflected on the company’s rapid ascent in Secrets of a 10-Year-Old Technology Startup, in which he talked about the transition from doing a few things really well to getting even better at a lot more things.
Nutanix has rapidly transformed its on-premises hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) into a fully hybrid multi-cloud platform over the past few years. It now has its infrastructure in almost every cloud on which it can land customers. Customers can also choose to deploy Nutanix themselves in one or more clouds of their choice.
Also Read: Nutanix Cloud Platform To Deliver Strengthened Data Services
Advancing its cause with new launches
The platform has added a few things to advance its cause. The new launches continue the company’s strategy of enabling its cloud platform to break down common silos within IT teams to simplify operations.
Given the multiple types of cloud computing now on offer and the variety of methods through which they can be interwoven, it’s easy to see why organisations often develop information silos. To gain more traction in this space, Nutanix launched its AOS version 6 software with new network virtualisation technology, which enables enterprises to build virtual private clouds and Era update eases data-management software for hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
“Our customers are looking for cloud solutions that can adapt to their needs, with a focus on simplicity, flexibility and freedom to choose the right technology for each situation,” said Rajiv Mirani, chief technology officer at Nutanix, in a statement. “The Nutanix Cloud Platform continues to break down common silos within IT teams with the goals of simplifying operations so customers can focus on business needs.”
The company also recently entered into a new strategic partnership with Citrix around HCI and hybrid cloud deployments. The announcement was rapidly followed by a similar agreement between Citrix and Google. Nutanix and Google have already been close partners for several years, as speculation of Google acquiring Nutanix to fill out its business services capabilities refuses to die down. After all, Google is no stranger to the concept of strategic acquisitions.
Hybrid cloud strategies are evolving faster than ever across every industry, and organisations increasingly count on flexibility and freedom of choice to build, run, and manage applications at scale. To that effect, in July, Nutanix announced its partnership with Red Hat, the leading provider of open source solutions.
This partnership is expected to deliver solutions for enterprises to build, scale, and manage virtual and cloud native applications on-premise and in the hybrid cloud.
Over the past decade, through all the technical and business ups and downs, one thing remained constant at Nutanix — driving more simplicity.
Even making HCI invisible to enterprise users. HCI uses hypervisor software to manage multiple virtual machines on multiple servers — applications above, commodity hardware below and Nutanix in the middle distributing compute, storage and networking without affecting application performance. “The key design challenge is that we have to fool everybody into thinking nothing above us has changed,” Pandey said.
Meanwhile, Nutanix continues to build its offerings outside of the core HCI software, including unstructured data storage. In September, the company announced strengthened data services for structured and unstructured data, including accelerated performance for modern analytics applications, unstructured data tiering from on-premises to cloud and a new unstructured data governance service, Nutanix Data Lens.
Also Read: Nutanix Cloud Platform Breaks Down Silos in Hybrid Multi-cloud
Nutanix says its Data Lens product is engineered for this exact journey, it manages unstructured data with a specific eye on looking for anomalous behaviours (access patterns, data age, data types) that could represent security risks.
Nutanix’s shift from selling HCI products was to focus on software and a subscription model. The move from a hardware to a software then a subscription business model is its way of building Nutanix for the long run.
Nutanix ended the second quarter of fiscal 2021 with about 18,770 end-customers, including about 950 of the Global 2000 after adding about 20 in the quarter. These include Hitachi Systems Power Services, Mercedes-Benz do Brasil, Roche, Saint-Gobain, and Total Gas & Power.
It’s been a busy year for Nutanix. It got a new CEO, who took over from co-founder Pandey; the company inked a deal with Red Hat; and recently its chief revenue officer and former worldwide sales leader, Chris Kaddaras, resigned from the company after a five-year stint.
Nutanix wants to be seen as a major player in the multi-cloud world, and that means adding tools and services that increase its potential as a one-stop-shop for users looking to operate across multiple cloud services. It must keep its eye on the endgame with a massive market opportunity ahead.
Also Read: Nutanix And Citrix Team Up To Power The Future Of Work
