Nutanix Doubles Down on Hybrid Cloud and AI Capabilities

Nutanix is perhaps best known for its hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) capabilities, but hybrid cloud and — increasingly — generative AI are where the company is headed.

Nutanix delivered a solid performance in its fiscal third quarter, which it reported on May 29. The company reported revenue of $524.58 million for a 17% year-over-year gain.

The company attributed the strong performance to a number of factors, including several large customer wins, one being a notable eight-figure annual contract value (ACV) deal with a Fortune 50 company for database automation.

Nutanix is also seeing potential opportunities arising from VMware defections, particularly amid the dynamic situation with Broadcom. This scenario presents a multiyear opportunity for Nutanix as enterprises evaluate their options and seek alternatives for their cloud infrastructure needs.

Perhaps more importantly, the company is also pushing forward with a series of new technologies and services with generative AI to help advance hybrid cloud operations.

"We continue to see steady demand for our solutions driven by businesses prioritizing their digital transformation and infrastructure modernization initiatives," Rajiv Ramaswami, CEO of Nutanix, said during his company's earnings call.

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Nutanix Betting Big on Generative AI

At its annual .NEXT conference in Barcelona earlier this month, Nutanix announced GPT-in-a-Box 2.0, an enhanced offering to simplify the deployment and management of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI workloads on-premises.

"At .NEXT, we announced GPT-in-a-Box 2.0, which will deliver expanded GPU and large language model support, automated configuration and management of model inference endpoints for genAI applications, simplified model management, and an expanded partner program," Ramaswami said.

The updated platform includes integration with Nvidia's inference microservices (NIMs) and a partnership with Hugging Face to provide access to its library LLMs for Nutanix customers.

Opening the Hybrid Cloud Frontier with Project Beacon

Nutanix also launched the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) at its .NEXT event to support hybrid cloud operations.

"We announced the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform, or NKP, to simplify management of container-based modern applications using Kubernetes, on-premises, and in any major public cloud service," Ramaswami said. "This allows customers to build and run cloud-native apps consistently across hybrid environments, aligning with Nutanix's cloud-everywhere vision code-named Project Beacon."

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Broadening Partnership with Dell

In a significant development, Nutanix expanded its strategic partnership with Dell to offer an integrated hyper-converged solution powered by Nutanix software running on Dell PowerEdge servers.

"We announced two new elements of our long-standing partnership. First, Dell is going to sell a tightly integrated hyper-converged solution combining the Nutanix Cloud platform software with Dell PowerEdge servers," Ramaswami stated.

Additionally, Nutanix will certify its AHV hypervisor to run on Dell PowerFlex storage, allowing customers to reuse existing Dell storage investments while transitioning to a hyper-converged infrastructure."Second, we will together deliver the Nutanix Cloud platform powered by AHV hypervisor for compute and Dell PowerFlex for storage,” he said. "This will allow customers to reuse some of their existing IP-based Dell 3-tier storage hardware, protecting their investment and giving them choice."