Nutanix CEO talks customer challenges and platform updates

Infrastructure vendor Nutanix has a busy year of releases and capabilities planned for 2025, according to President and CEO Rajiv Ramaswami.

At the vendor's Nutanix Next show in Washington this week, Nutanix debuted new storage partnerships, a Kubernetes container deployment option and a deeper AI partnership with Nvidia. These launches are just the start of grander infrastructure ambitions for Nutanix, according to Ramaswami, as he anticipates a continued exodus from the VMware platform under Broadcom's ownership.

Rajiv Ramaswami

Ramaswami served as VMware's COO of products and cloud services from 2016 to 2020 before joining Nutanix. His other experience at VMware included executive vice president and general manager of VMware's Networking and Security business. Other roles included leadership positions at Cisco, Nortel, Tellabs and IBM.

In this Q&A, Ramaswami discusses where he sees the Nutanix platform evolving, how he aims to maintain customer satisfaction and what modern infrastructure means for a virtualization platform.

Editor's note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

What are some major market concerns you're hearing lately, and how are you planning to attract more customers?

The No. 1 thing we hear is Broadcom. That's [our potential customers'] top-of-mind concern because they all have VMware deployed, and they're all trying to figure out what to do next.

Rajiv Ramaswami: The No. 1 thing we hear is Broadcom. That's [our potential customers'] top-of-mind concern because they all have VMware deployed, and they're all trying to figure out what to do next. Now that they're being forced to look at their current vendor, [they have to] think about what's their long-term plan.

They want to make sure another vendor can support them and [be] with them over the next five to 10 years. It's not just migrating to somebody else who's going to do the same thing. There's no future there, and that's not what they want to do.

We want to build others' capabilities on the Nutanix platform. We're focusing on education [and] certifications, which is a big element of what we see at the show here. Historically, we've been a smaller company, but we're maturing as a platform company, and we're [looking at education] programs in a more systematic way.

What's the major focus for Nutanix as a company in 2025?

Ramaswami: We're going to continue to drive innovation of the core platform and then grow the platform ecosystem. We're continuing to invest in scale, security, cloud capabilities and AI.

AI is moving at a very rapid pace in terms of the maturity of the models and how people should be deploying applications, so we're keeping up with that while growing our partner ecosystem.

Is Nutanix looking to keep the platform open since lock-in is a real concern?

Ramaswami: You don't get [customer satisfaction] if you're going to force customers to do what you want or not take care of them.

We provide the freedom and flexibility in every layer of the stack. They choose the hardware. They can choose the hypervisor. Even though we offer a hypervisor choice now, more and more customers are choosing our hypervisor. They can still run on VMware [however] and use the rest of our stack on top of that if they want to.

In terms of lock-in, we are very flexible in providing licenses that the customer can port anywhere and go anywhere [with]. We're also quite happy to give them long-term commitments in terms of how prices will look.

We have about 27,000 customers, but we want further expansion as the addressable opportunity for us is over 100,000 customers.

Another concern from those leaving VMware is like-for-like compatibility. With the focus of this Next conference on modernization, how are you meeting those specific former-VMware needs?

Ramaswami: We're not doing like-for-like, but we're pretty much similar. We have a full stack of virtualized compute, storage and networking. We do it differently than how Broadcom does it and we differentiate in many ways.

We have a lot more data services than VMware. Our hypervisor is based on open source, so we focus our innovation on our storage and platform services for file and object [storage].

Our cloud offerings are a bit different [from VMware] in how they get used. It's the same single license that people can deploy wherever they want [for] the same software. That's what I mean by simplicity in terms of how you deploy and operate.

The [perpetual license] days are largely gone. We started 10 years after VMware did, so we had the luxury of building a modern platform. We're investing about 25% of our sales back into R&D. We continue to do that because we want to drive innovation, invest for the future and invest in modern applications.

If you look at Broadcom's VMware, they're very focused on today's platform and meeting today's needs.

Have customers started using the platform for more modern infrastructure, or are they mostly staying with traditional virtualization?

Ramaswami: People are deploying a lot of classic virtualization right now for their existing and current applications. These applications are going to remain for the next 10 years, and when you talk to customers, they're pretty happy with the virtualization options they have today.

But it's the whole new class application that we are targeting with Cloud Native AOS. The new applications today are being built in containers. As people start building more and more over these next few years, they're going to need services like cloud-ready storage. They'll be deploying on bare metal in some cases. There's a market established for this, [such as] Red Hat with their container software suite.

A large push at this year's show is about partner technologies, particularly around storage. Why not develop these capabilities in-house, or do the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) origins limit the platform somehow?

Ramaswami: The reason we do this is not for scale, but for choice. Scale used to be an issue many years ago, but not anymore. We have end-user computing customers with hundreds of thousands of users.

Some [customers] have existing storage arrays, and they want to run Dell or Pure Storage. In the past, we didn't support them. Now, I look at this from an evolution from being a pure HCI player.

Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.