Nutanix: simplifying cloud & data centre space

Nutanix has raised more than $312 million from investors including Sapphire Ventures, the investment arm of the German enterprise software company SAP, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Riverwood Capital.

Founded by Dheeraj Pandey, this US-based technology startup has shaken the established big players in the space of cloud computing and data centre. The company deals in the area of hyper-converged infrastructure providing a single solution combining hardware and software in the areas of data centre and cloud.

We are well aware of the fact that currently the adoption of cloud solutions remains uneven because of various geographic and generational factors.

Nutanix, the US-based technology startup, was founded in 2009 and it set itself a goal to make the back-end technology infrastructure of servers and storage invisible. The increasing number of computing transactions on various devices like PC, desktop, laptop or mobiles mean adding layers of technology to manage the entire process. Nutanix, hence aims at simplifies and ease these issues.

It is yet to go public enjoys a valuation of $2 billion. Pandey says, enterprises spend tonnes of money in hardware and the idea of convergence becomes a long lasting idea. Hence, the core focus of Nutanix is to make technology infrastructure completely invisible. Enterprises are irritated when more components are added to the platform and Nutanix wants to put an end to this. Dheeraj Pandey, founder & CEO, Nutanix says, “The end being get me out of the rut of details and make it invisible.”

Though, Nutanix is focussed on building the next level of technology, they do not plan to lose out on customer service. They feel, all great companies such as Apple or Amazon are built on the foundation of superior service. India is not out of picture for Nutanix, it is all set for Indian market as well. Where it believes that enterprises can bypass the entire gamut of compute, virtualisation and storage to get directly into the cloud market.

Dheeraj says, “We have to imagine humanless data centres at scale and it is still a large problem to solve,” and this would in fact mean bringing in just in time cloud services, which is easier said than done. Nutanix is currently considered a premium brand and its prime competitor is VMWare, which Pandey believes that the company is eminently beatable despite its size.

Having said that he does realise that competition is going to be intense as it gains market share. “We are only a six year old company and our business is as big as Oracle was in 1990.” But, their core goal is to simplify tasks for enterprises irrespective of their sizes. And “one cannot argue against keeping things simple,” says Pandey.