What Is Nutanix?

Nutanix is a San Jose, California-based cloud computing software company best known for pioneering hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI). The company sells HCI appliances and software-defined storage, and has increasingly positioned itself as a hybrid cloud platform vendor — enabling enterprises to run, move, and manage workloads across on-premises data centres and public clouds from a single management plane.

The Shifting Enterprise Technology Landscape

According to Anantharaman, a major shift is underway in how enterprises think about their IT systems. Organisations that were traditionally B2B and operated purely as systems of record are now building systems of engagement — technology layers designed to reach customers faster, improve acquisition, and deliver better digital experiences.

This shift is visible in the proliferation of SaaS applications being adopted by banks, financial institutions, and other large enterprises. The core question driving IT investment decisions has become: “What systems of engagement can I deploy to reach customers faster?”

How Cloud Computing Has Evolved in India

Anantharaman identifies two distinct phases of cloud adoption in India:

• Phase 1 – Peripheral applications: Enterprises moved workloads like HRMS, Learning Management Systems (LMS), customer experience platforms, and digital front-end applications to the cloud. These were relatively low-risk migrations.
• Phase 2 – Business-critical applications: Enterprises are now evaluating whether the next tier of applications — not just mission-critical systems like core banking, but business-critical workloads — are ready for cloud deployment. This workload evaluation is a defining challenge for enterprise IT teams today.

India’s startup ecosystem has also accelerated cloud adoption. Startups typically begin without owning any infrastructure, defaulting to public cloud from day one. As they scale, IT costs become a significant operational concern, which is where vendors like Nutanix offer an alternative to pure public cloud spend.

Nutanix’s Hybrid Cloud Strategy

Nutanix’s core value proposition centres on four capabilities:

1. Data centre modernisation: Collapsing traditional three-tier architecture (compute, storage, networking as separate silos) into a single unified hyper-converged fabric.
2. Single-pane management: Providing a unified management interface that reduces operational complexity and administrative overhead.
3. Cloud mobility: Enabling customers to move applications to public cloud providers when needed — and to move them back on-premises if cost, security, or performance requirements change.
4. Interoperability: Supporting workloads across multiple cloud environments, avoiding lock-in to any single public cloud provider.

This bidirectional flexibility — move to cloud, move from cloud — is positioned as a key differentiator. Anantharaman describes it as the company’s essential functionality: app mobility and cloud interoperability.

Key Products in the Nutanix Portfolio

Beyond core HCI, Nutanix has built a broader software portfolio addressing hybrid cloud management, security, and containerisation:

• Karbon: A Kubernetes management platform for building and running containerised applications on Nutanix infrastructure.
• Beam: A multi-cloud cost governance and compliance tool that gives customers visibility into public cloud spend versus on-premises costs, and across different public cloud providers.
• Flow: A network micro-segmentation product that provides application-level traffic control for virtual machines, adding a security layer without requiring additional physical network appliances.

Market Position and HCI Leadership in India

Anantharaman cited IDC data indicating Nutanix held a 47.4% share of the India HCI market at the time of the interview, maintaining market leadership for seven consecutive quarters. The company also highlights that it has made its software available across approximately 17 hardware platforms, allowing customers to run the Nutanix software stack on hardware from their preferred vendor rather than being tied to Nutanix-branded appliances.

This hardware-agnostic software model has contributed to Wall Street reclassifying Nutanix as a software and subscription company rather than a hardware appliance vendor — a strategic repositioning with significant implications for revenue predictability and gross margins.

Key Verticals and Customer Use Cases in India

Anantharaman identified the following sectors as primary targets:

• IT and ITES: The largest segment by cloud deployment volume in India.
• Banking and financial services: ICICI Bank was cited as a customer running its enterprise service bus — the integration layer between external-facing systems and internal architecture — on Nutanix.
• Government: Growing interest in cloud infrastructure among government agencies.
• Agriculture and enterprise: One of the world’s largest seed companies (unnamed) uses Nutanix for a hub-and-spoke model managing remote branch offices.
• System integrators: Nutanix built a self-service developer portal for one of India’s largest system integrators, enabling internal application launches without manual provisioning.

Hybrid Cloud Outlook for India

Nutanix’s 2018 Enterprise Cloud Index — an annual survey of enterprise cloud adoption trends — reported that hybrid cloud workload adoption in India was projected to more than triple, from 13% to 43%. The same report indicated that private cloud usage was expected to decline from 38% to 23% as enterprises migrated those workloads into hybrid cloud models.

Anantharaman summarised the broader market sentiment with a telling indicator: more CEOs in India are now actively asking their IT teams, “Are we cloud-like?” — signalling that cloud readiness has moved from a technical discussion to a board-level strategic priority.

Key Takeaways for DevOps and Infrastructure Teams

• Hybrid cloud is increasingly the default enterprise architecture, not a transitional state.
• Workload portability — the ability to move applications between on-premises and public cloud — is a critical requirement when evaluating infrastructure platforms.
• HCI reduces operational overhead by collapsing traditional three-tier data centre architecture into a single managed fabric.
• Cost governance tools like Nutanix Beam are becoming essential as multi-cloud environments make cloud spend harder to track and control.
• Micro-segmentation (Nutanix Flow) provides application-level network security for VM workloads without dedicated hardware.
• Container orchestration support (Nutanix Karbon) reflects the broader industry shift toward Kubernetes-based application deployment.

Original interview source: Financial Express. Interview conducted by Sudhir Chowdhary with Balakrishnan Anantharaman, VP & MD Sales – India & SAARC, Nutanix.