The rapid pace of change in the enterprise IT landscape has rarely been more evident than in recent years, as organizations scramble to modernize infrastructure, avoid vendor lock-in, and adopt cloud-native technologies. At the front lines of this transformation is Nutanix, an infrastructure vendor whose ambitious roadmap for 2025 and candid leadership have drawn heightened attention, especially in the wake of significant changes at VMware under Broadcom’s ownership. In an exclusive interview at the Nutanix Next conference in Washington, Nutanix President and CEO Rajiv Ramaswami gave TechTarget an inside look at how the company is responding to customers’ top challenges, detailing new partnerships, platform updates, and broad strategies designed to meet the needs of an evolving market.
The cloud infrastructure market has been rocked by Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, shaking the confidence of many enterprise customers who depend on VMware’s virtualization platform. Rajiv Ramaswami, himself a former VMware executive, makes it clear: the number one concern Nutanix hears from potential customers is “Broadcom.” Enterprises deployed at scale on VMware are now forced to reevaluate their vendor relationships and plan for the long term. According to Ramaswami, these organizations are not interested in lateral moves that preserve the status quo; instead, they’re seeking a modern, forward-looking alternative.
“Now that they're being forced to look at their current vendor, [they have to] think about what's their long-term plan,” Ramaswami explains. “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.”
This shift away from VMware presents a massive opportunity for Nutanix—a company that, while still smaller than industry behemoths, has matured significantly in recent years. Its core message is not just about migration, but transformation: help enterprises modernize, innovate, and compete in a rapidly changing IT environment.
This open, partnership-driven approach is notable in a market often dominated by vendors who prefer lock-in strategies. Nutanix’s willingness to support third-party storage arrays and multiple hypervisors signals a maturation in its product philosophy—one that prioritizes customer choice and reduces barriers to adoption.
Indeed, Nutanix’s hypervisor is based on open source, giving customers flexibility without dictating terms. While Nutanix now offers its own hypervisor, many customers continue to run VMware or other hypervisors atop Nutanix infrastructure, leveraging the stack that best meets their needs.
In pricing and licensing, the company also aims for transparency and flexibility. “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.” This contrasts with the market’s historic reliance on perpetual licenses, which are giving way to more dynamic operational expenditure models.
With an installed base of about 27,000 customers, Nutanix sees its addressable market as vastly larger—over 100,000 potential customers, by its count. This growth target depends heavily on proving value to Broadcom/VMware refugees and capitalizing on current discontent in the virtualization market.
Notably, Nutanix offers more data services than VMware and focuses its innovation on storage and platform services—especially file and object storage. The platform’s modern construction (Nutanix started development a decade after VMware) allows it to address perennial pain points—chiefly operational simplicity, cross-cloud deployment, and cost predictability.
Also, Nutanix’s single-license approach stands out. Any customer can deploy the same software package in their data center or the public cloud—avoiding the complexity and cost fragmentation that can plague other solutions.
A concrete example is its Cloud Native AOS (Acropolis Operating System), which targets next-generation workloads built in containers. This capability is pivotal, as the modern application landscape increasingly demands support for microservices, container orchestration, and hybrid or multi-cloud architectures.
Ramaswami’s prior leadership at VMware, Cisco, and IBM gives him a unique vantage point on how to foster community as well as scale. The Next conference itself, with its focus on both business and technical tracks, reflects the company’s ambitions to mature from a “smaller company” to a true platform provider with reach beyond its roots.
Nutanix is positioning its platform for both worlds: supporting legacy VMs and enabling the adoption of containers and cloud-native patterns as customers’ needs evolve. The Cloud Native AOS initiative signals a long-term roadmap that accommodates both continuities and disruptions in how infrastructure is consumed.
“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,” Ramaswami explains.
This pragmatic approach may help Nutanix compete for large accounts that are unwilling or unable to rip and replace their existing infrastructure.
This messaging is particularly timely given the uncertainty surrounding VMware customers after Broadcom’s acquisition. As large enterprise customers weigh exit strategies, Nutanix stands to benefit from its stance on flexibility and openness.
However, some caution is warranted. While the company claims a high degree of openness, integration and interoperability are nontrivial: truly seamless migration from VMware, for example, will always face friction arising from differences in architectures, APIs, and operational idioms. Early enterprise adopters will need to rigorously test these claims and evaluate third-party ecosystem support before committing to major platform shifts.
Still, the true test will come as enterprise customers undertake large-scale migrations. Platform evaluation should involve rigorous proof-of-concept testing, not just on technical compatibility, but also in long-term support contracts, partner reliability, and overall total cost of ownership.
Enterprises ready to modernize their infrastructure—without embracing the risks of yet another lock-in—will find a compelling vision in Nutanix’s platform. Yet, as with all strategic technology decisions, the devil remains in the details. The coming year will reveal whether Nutanix can translate its high-profile partnerships, product updates, and customer-friendly talk into durable industry leadership.
For now, the battle for VMware’s installed base is just beginning, and Nutanix is making an aggressive play—one that the world’s IT decision-makers will be watching closely.
Source: TechTarget Nutanix CEO talks customer challenges and platform updates | TechTarget
The VMware Exodus and Nutanix’s Big Opportunity
The cloud infrastructure market has been rocked by Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, shaking the confidence of many enterprise customers who depend on VMware’s virtualization platform. Rajiv Ramaswami, himself a former VMware executive, makes it clear: the number one concern Nutanix hears from potential customers is “Broadcom.” Enterprises deployed at scale on VMware are now forced to reevaluate their vendor relationships and plan for the long term. According to Ramaswami, these organizations are not interested in lateral moves that preserve the status quo; instead, they’re seeking a modern, forward-looking alternative.“Now that they're being forced to look at their current vendor, [they have to] think about what's their long-term plan,” Ramaswami explains. “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.”
This shift away from VMware presents a massive opportunity for Nutanix—a company that, while still smaller than industry behemoths, has matured significantly in recent years. Its core message is not just about migration, but transformation: help enterprises modernize, innovate, and compete in a rapidly changing IT environment.
Expanding Capabilities: New Partnerships and Expanded Platform Ecosystem
At the 2025 Nutanix Next show, the company announced an array of new capabilities designed to broaden the appeal and flexibility of its platform. Key highlights include:- New storage partnerships: Nutanix introduced deeper integrations with leading storage vendors such as Dell and Pure Storage. These partnerships allow customers to leverage existing storage arrays alongside Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure, a strategic pivot from the company’s pure HCI roots.
- Kubernetes container deployment option: Recognizing the relentless advance of cloud-native development, Nutanix rolled out expanded Kubernetes support. Enterprises can now deploy modern, containerized workloads with greater ease, enabling a smoother transition to microservices and DevOps workflows.
- AI partnership with Nvidia: As AI workloads accelerate, Nutanix announced a deepened partnership with Nvidia, aimed at optimizing the platform for modern AI applications, from model training to inference.
This open, partnership-driven approach is notable in a market often dominated by vendors who prefer lock-in strategies. Nutanix’s willingness to support third-party storage arrays and multiple hypervisors signals a maturation in its product philosophy—one that prioritizes customer choice and reduces barriers to adoption.
Alleviating Customer Concerns: Flexibility Over Lock-In
Vendor lock-in remains a recurring nightmare for enterprise IT decision-makers. Nutanix’s answer, according to Ramaswami, is baked into every layer of their stack: “We provide the freedom and flexibility in every layer of the stack. They choose the hardware. They can choose the hypervisor.”Indeed, Nutanix’s hypervisor is based on open source, giving customers flexibility without dictating terms. While Nutanix now offers its own hypervisor, many customers continue to run VMware or other hypervisors atop Nutanix infrastructure, leveraging the stack that best meets their needs.
In pricing and licensing, the company also aims for transparency and flexibility. “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.” This contrasts with the market’s historic reliance on perpetual licenses, which are giving way to more dynamic operational expenditure models.
With an installed base of about 27,000 customers, Nutanix sees its addressable market as vastly larger—over 100,000 potential customers, by its count. This growth target depends heavily on proving value to Broadcom/VMware refugees and capitalizing on current discontent in the virtualization market.
Modernization vs. “Like-for-Like” Compatibility
For enterprises transitioning off VMware, a key demand is “like-for-like” compatibility—easy migration with minimal disruption. Ramaswami acknowledges this expectation but points out that Nutanix’s vision is about more than replication: “We're not doing like-for-like, but we're pretty much similar. We have a full stack of virtualized compute, storage, and networking,” he explains. The difference, he says, lies in how these services are delivered and extended.Notably, Nutanix offers more data services than VMware and focuses its innovation on storage and platform services—especially file and object storage. The platform’s modern construction (Nutanix started development a decade after VMware) allows it to address perennial pain points—chiefly operational simplicity, cross-cloud deployment, and cost predictability.
Also, Nutanix’s single-license approach stands out. Any customer can deploy the same software package in their data center or the public cloud—avoiding the complexity and cost fragmentation that can plague other solutions.
R&D-Driven Culture and a Commitment to Innovation
Nutanix’s long-term prospects turn on its ability to out-innovate competitors. The company claims to invest roughly 25% of its sales back into research and development—a figure that notably outpaces many of its larger rivals. This commitment is justified by Ramaswami’s belief that “AI is moving at a very rapid pace in terms of the maturity of the models and how people should be deploying applications,” and that Nutanix needs to keep up with this evolution.A concrete example is its Cloud Native AOS (Acropolis Operating System), which targets next-generation workloads built in containers. This capability is pivotal, as the modern application landscape increasingly demands support for microservices, container orchestration, and hybrid or multi-cloud architectures.
Maintaining Satisfaction and Building a Community
While Nutanix’s technological vision is ambitious, Ramaswami is adamant that a focus on education, certifications, and customer enablement is just as crucial. “We’re focusing on education [and] certifications,” he noted, acknowledging the need for a strong ecosystem and talent pool around the Nutanix platform, not just technical prowess.Ramaswami’s prior leadership at VMware, Cisco, and IBM gives him a unique vantage point on how to foster community as well as scale. The Next conference itself, with its focus on both business and technical tracks, reflects the company’s ambitions to mature from a “smaller company” to a true platform provider with reach beyond its roots.
Meeting Customers Where They Are: Traditional Virtualization and Beyond
For all the talk of modernization, the reality is that most enterprises are still running significant quantities of traditional virtual machines. Ramaswami recognizes this: “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.”Nutanix is positioning its platform for both worlds: supporting legacy VMs and enabling the adoption of containers and cloud-native patterns as customers’ needs evolve. The Cloud Native AOS initiative signals a long-term roadmap that accommodates both continuities and disruptions in how infrastructure is consumed.
Strategic Partnerships: Why Nutanix Isn’t Reinventing Every Capability
In addressing questions about the breadth of its storage and cloud offerings, Ramaswami is frank: the move to partner with established storage array vendors is not about scale, but about choice. While Nutanix’s hyperconverged origins made it a one-stop-shop for compute and storage, its maturity as a platform company is reflected in a willingness to let customers “run Dell or Pure Storage” arrays in concert with Nutanix infrastructure.“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,” Ramaswami explains.
This pragmatic approach may help Nutanix compete for large accounts that are unwilling or unable to rip and replace their existing infrastructure.
The Significance of Openness
A recurring theme—in both Ramaswami’s comments and Nutanix’s product direction—is openness: open-source hypervisors, portable licenses, hardware agnosticism, and open partnerships. For a market wary of lock-in, these are powerful signals.This messaging is particularly timely given the uncertainty surrounding VMware customers after Broadcom’s acquisition. As large enterprise customers weigh exit strategies, Nutanix stands to benefit from its stance on flexibility and openness.
However, some caution is warranted. While the company claims a high degree of openness, integration and interoperability are nontrivial: truly seamless migration from VMware, for example, will always face friction arising from differences in architectures, APIs, and operational idioms. Early enterprise adopters will need to rigorously test these claims and evaluate third-party ecosystem support before committing to major platform shifts.
Critical Analysis: The Promise and the Perils Ahead
Nutanix’s public roadmap and leadership vision present a compelling case for the modern enterprise tempted by hyperscale cloud but wary of public cloud lock-in and vendor disruption. The company’s strengths are clear:- Agility and R&D focus: Outspending many rivals on technical innovation gives Nutanix the ability to move quickly and address gaps in legacy platforms.
- Partnership and choice: By embracing third-party storage and open technologies, Nutanix lowers the switching costs—critical for enterprises considering migration.
- Unified cloud/hybrid story: A single license that works across on-premises and cloud deployments simplifies cost and operational planning.
- Scale and support capacity: As Nutanix targets tenfold growth, questions remain about its ability to support enterprise workloads at global scale, particularly if faced with a rapid influx of migrating VMware customers.
- Competing priorities: Managing continued support for traditional virtualization while advancing towards cloud-native and AI workloads is a delicate balance. The danger is spreading resources too thin or diluting product quality.
- Ecosystem risk: While openness is touted, Nutanix’s ecosystem of third-party integrations is nascent compared to long-standing industry platforms. Customers should verify critical integrations—and vendor support—before large-scale adoption.
- Uncertain competitive landscape: Established infrastructure vendors are themselves pivoting quickly, and hyperscale public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) continue to dominate the cloud conversation. Nutanix’s competitive advantage may narrow if these giants address portability and openness more aggressively.
What Does This Mean for Enterprise Buyers?
For organizations contemplating an exit from VMware, or those pursuing cloud-native modernization, Nutanix offers a credible, well-resourced alternative. The flexibility in infrastructure choices, licensing, and deployment models is a marked improvement over traditional, monolithic virtualization platforms. Nutanix’s partnerships with leading storage vendors and Nvidia further insulate it from accusations of lock-in, while demonstrating a commitment to supporting modern, AI-driven workloads.Still, the true test will come as enterprise customers undertake large-scale migrations. Platform evaluation should involve rigorous proof-of-concept testing, not just on technical compatibility, but also in long-term support contracts, partner reliability, and overall total cost of ownership.
Conclusion: The Path Forward
Nutanix stands at a crossroads—poised to capture significant market share from a virtualization market in flux, but also charged with executing flawlessly across product, support, and ecosystem enablement. Under Ramaswami’s leadership, the company is doubling down on openness, innovation, and customer choice.Enterprises ready to modernize their infrastructure—without embracing the risks of yet another lock-in—will find a compelling vision in Nutanix’s platform. Yet, as with all strategic technology decisions, the devil remains in the details. The coming year will reveal whether Nutanix can translate its high-profile partnerships, product updates, and customer-friendly talk into durable industry leadership.
For now, the battle for VMware’s installed base is just beginning, and Nutanix is making an aggressive play—one that the world’s IT decision-makers will be watching closely.
Source: TechTarget Nutanix CEO talks customer challenges and platform updates | TechTarget
