Nutanix bets big on govt clients, defence projects after Nasdaq debut

With three Indian co-founders, cloud-computing firm Nutanix, which opened to a blockbuster initial public offering on Nasdaq three years ago, is looking to bet big on government clients in India, said a senior executive. 

Nutanix is the leader in the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) business, and sees significant opportunity in “state and Centre and defence” areas of the government, said Balakrishnan Anantharaman, vice-president and managing director–sales, India and South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, Nutanix. 

“And what that would mean is that, we work with the ecosystem and so we are putting in the resources in places, and actually work in smart cities, work in the state datacentre modernisation and, of course, various other state government projects which are there. Clearly, that would be an area of focus for us, along with the start-up piece,” he added. 

According to Network World, HCI is an information technology (IT) framework that combines storage, computing, and networking into a single system in an effort to reduce datacentre complexity and increase scalability. 

From a channel partner perspective, Nutanix has started focusing on Tier-1 channel partners. “I think our growth in the past three-four years we have been here, has come from Tier-2 partners. We are now engaged with the larger ones — the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Wipros of the world. We are also looking at other enterprise customers,” said Anantharaman. 

In India, the company serves customers such as stock exchanges, brokers, non-banking financial companies, financial services and insurance, IT and IT-enabled services. As system integrators such as Wipro, TCS and others help cater to the cloud-heavy workload of their clients, Nutanix helps them make the internal transition themselves.

“So if they (system integrators) want to provide security tools or something as a service, they essentially try to see if Nutanix can help them,” Anantharaman said, adding that health care and pharma have also been big adopters of Nutanix’s technology. 

In its most recent quarterly earnings reported in November, Nutanix reported $314 million in revenue, of which software and support was about $305 million, which shows that the firm’s stated aim of reducing revenue from its hardware business is working as planned. 

The San Jose-based firm expects software and support billings between $1.65 billion and $1.75 billion in the current financial year.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Dheeraj Pandey is a board member of technology giant Adobe, and has driven the company to compete effectively against large firms such as VMWare and Dell. 

Nutanix has partnerships with HP Enterprises, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Services and so on, giving it an edge over competitors in building hybrid cloud environments. 

In India, Nutanix expects to employ more than 600 engineers in research and development (R&D) by year-end, and has made a few strategic acquisitions in the country as well. 

“So India is not only a customer support centre or a back office, we are actually doing cutting-edge R&D work out here. If you look at some of our products beyond our Core HCI, we acquired (Bengaluru-based) Calm.io, which is our office station. And then we have Beam, which was an Indian organisation called Minjar, which we acquired. So we have seen quite of these software potions of our Nutanix portfolio coming in from India,” said Anantharaman.