‘I would say we are seeing a good clip of new logos coming to us, and the channel is involved in a lot of those. In a lot of cases, it’s a co-sell model between us and the channel, but the transactions are all done through the channel. We’re seeing quite a bit of that,’ says Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami.
After Nutanix reported its first fiscal quarter 2026 financials, CEO Rajiv Ramaswami sat down with a handful of media sites including CRN to look at the company beyond the numbers.
While Nutanix reported revenue below expectations and said that it is cutting its full fiscal 2026 revenue outlook, Ramaswami said the company is making changes that will result in a stronger one going forward.
For instance, he said 640 VMware customers migrated at least some of their workloads to Nutanix during the quarter, and he noted that Nutanix continues to compete strongly against VMware owner Broadcom, especially when it comes to cloud-native and AI workloads.
[Related: Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami: The ‘Surge’ Is On]
“The vast majority of the application footprint is still VM-based, but new applications are clearly being built as modern applications with containers,” he said. “So for us, it’s about how do we be relevant to both worlds: enable them to run their existing applications but also give our customers the ability to have a platform where they can run their new applications.”
Ramaswami said Nutanix’s focus on innovation and on new storage partnerships with Dell Technologies and Pure Storage will bring new innovations.
Ramaswami’s optimism for the future came against a backdrop of a somewhat disappointing present. For its first fiscal quarter of 2026, the company reported total revenue of $670.6 million, up 13 percent over the $591.0 million it reported for its first fiscal quarter of 2025 but about $6 million below expectations.
The company also said it expects revenue for its second fiscal quarter of 2026 of $705 million to $715 million, short of analyst expectations of $749 million, according to Seeking Alpha. Full-year revenue was guided to be between $2.82 billion and $2.86 billion, compared with prior projections of $2.90 billion to $2.94 billion.
Here is more of Ramaswami’s look at the future of Nutanix.
Nutanix Conversion Rate Of VMware Customers
Ramaswami said 640 VMware customers migrated to Nutanix during the first fiscal quarter after 2,700 migrated during all of fiscal 2025.
“I wouldn’t say they’re all migrating everything over. They’re migrating some portion. For example, among them, we had a Global 2000, a very large EMEA customer there. They’re not migrating everything. In fact, we said that they specifically brought in Nutanix to help with their security use case. So they still have a huge amount of VMware left, and hopefully we’ll capture some more of that over time. The bigger the customer we get a piece of the estates; the smaller it’s more likely to be a full migration. … I think it’s pretty broad-based [in terms of use cases]. So pretty much almost all VM applications, whether it be mission-critical databases, business-critical applications, core applications, security-related use cases, it runs the gamut pretty much.
How Nutanix Is Developing New Services And Platforms For Organic Growth
We’ve evolved from being an HCI [hyperconverged infrastructure] company to now a cloud platform company. What that says for us is a couple of different new vectors. One vector is, we want to provide a compute-oriented platform, not just storage. A compute-oriented platform, compute, networking, and management operations that can work with third-party storage of all kinds. So now we’ve got Dell PowerFlex, [with Dell PowerStore coming on board very shortly. Pure [Storage soon]. So the platform is a bit broader on that front. The other vector of expansion has been into the public cloud. So we now are on-boarding Google. We had AWS and [Microsoft] Azure before. Then the big new things for us really are cloud-native and AI. So when you look at cloud-native, we have a full-blown, full-fledged Kubernetes platform today that’s multi-cloud, so we’re investing in that quite significantly. And then AI is still for us fairly early, and enterprise inferencing is largely for us [as well]. That’s still early, not just for us, but also for our customers. But those would be the newer areas.
How Migration To Cloud-Native Technologies Impacts Nutanix’s On-Premises Business
This whole notion of if customers take their existing workloads and move it on to the public cloud and make them cloud-native, then we lose the workload, right? But I would say the trend has slightly been kind of different over the last few years. It’s not that everybody’s moving en masse to the public cloud. A lot of the things that went to the public cloud were for net-new applications, to start with, [and] not taking a legacy application and putting it into a public cloud framework. Some of that happened, but not a lot. A lot of it was new applications. Now I would say the world is more hybrid than before. Not everything is going to the cloud. People are realizing, well, that’s expensive. I’m not going to. Customers may not want to operate a data center, but what that means is they might run it in a colo provider. They might run it in a service [with] a local service provider. They may not necessarily take it all the way to the public cloud. And so there’s more different options out there. There’s a public cloud, there’s colos and local service providers, and there’s on-prem, and there’s edge environments, and so I think it’s a good mix of all of those. And across all of those, I would say the pace of modernization of the app itself is still in its infancy. So I think the vast majority of the application footprint is still VM-based, but new applications are clearly being built as modern applications with containers. So for us, it’s about how do we be relevant to both worlds: enable them to run their existing applications but also give our customers the ability to have a platform where they can run their new applications.
Nutanix’s Innovation Priorities
For me, in the short term, it’s getting all these external storage partners up and going so that we can go capture more of that footprint that’s out there. But beyond that, it’s squarely cloud-native and AI. …
First, I think it’s about on-boarding all of these partners. We have [Dell] PowerFlex already in production. Now we have to get Pure [Storage] out the door, which is actually happening very quickly, before the end of the year is what we’ve said. So we’ve got another month or less to get that done, and it’s already in early access, in beta form, and now we just have to make it generally available. We’ve got Dell PowerStore coming on board, and there’s a few other storage partners that we’re also working with that we haven’t announced yet, as you can imagine. That’s all about execution in the short term, get it done over the next year. Beyond that, [it’s] cloud-native and AI. The cloud-native part, we have a platform. We continue to enhance that platform quite a bit. And AI is where I think there’s a lot still to be figured out. Everything from providing a turnkey AI stack for inferencing for enterprises to the value-added set of capabilities that we can bring to help customers run their AI in a private and secure way with enterprise-grade security, with predictable cost, being able to operate as a shared service. That’s a big chunk of our focus when it comes to enterprise AI. And there’s still a lot of work to be done as the AI field itself is evolving rapidly and we’re still working through that. It’s still pretty early days for us, so I expect a lot to come there over time.
Nutanix’s AI Focus: Inferencing Or Training
We want customers to use whatever models they’d like to use. We are not in the business of models. We are in the business of giving them a platform that they can run those models on. Our platform is more tuned towards inferencing and running agentic AI than for training large models. Training large models needs massive farms with HPC [high-performance computing]-type clusters. That’s not our sweet spot. Taking those models that are pre-trained and using them in applications, that’s our sweet spot.
How Nutanix Partners Are Changing As Workloads Migrate From VMware And The Business Moves Away From On-Premises To Cloud-Native
I think on the Broadcom-VMware piece, there’s haves and have-nots. There’s a subset of channel partners that are still very engaged with Broadcom, then they’ve also shed a lot of channel partners and they’ve also gone direct in a lot of accounts. So we have been seeing an influx of channel partners coming to our platform, including some very good former VMware partners. And by the way, that applies also to service providers and not just VARs or resellers. This is an opportunity for us to scale faster through the channel because we can’t scale everywhere, and the channel is there everywhere. We have responded by on-boarding them, enabling them, providing them with incentives to land new customers for us. They may not be net-new for our channel partners, but they are net-new for Nutanix. And I would say we are seeing a good clip of new logos coming to us, and the channel is involved in a lot of those. In a lot of cases, it’s a co-sell model between us and the channel, but the transactions are all done through the channel. We’re seeing quite a bit of that.
When it comes to cloud-native, I would say it’s still very early days for the channel. There’s a lot of skilling that they need to do, and enablement and training and helping customers also, in terms of how to go about running these applications. We’ve seen much more maturity in our channel partners when they’re selling virtual machine use cases compared to selling containers and Kubernetes, as we tend to find that we need to be much more involved in terms of the value proposition. And by the way, that’s not just true for the channel partners. That’s true for our own sellers. We have a specialist team that supports our general field in terms of some of these newer products like cloud-native and AI. We have a specialist overlay sales team that understands this very well, and they can actually work with our broad sellers to go drive that in the market. I think the channel may have to invest in something like that too because not everybody in the channel, not every seller, is going to get it. And so you’re going to have to, as a channel partner, also invest in making sure sales engineers are trained with these new technologies. You may want to have an overlay model for some of these newer technologies to get them in and get them going.
On Nutanix Sharing Customer Workloads With VMware Cloud Foundation
Our aspirations of course are we would want to get the whole estate. But we are not under the impression that we can capture all of it everywhere. Surely, the larger the customer, the more we can capture a piece of the estate. Not everything, because it’s just by nature very complex. If you’re a Fortune 50 company, you’re going to have a very complex estate. Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t just really get off Broadcom in the short term, or even in the medium term, for example. So in those scenarios, we try and say, ‘OK, where can we add value? What subset of applications can we run? What use cases can we support?’ And there are things that we can do that Broadcom cannot do. We support databases very well on our platform. We have a modern cloud, a native Kubernetes solution that works pretty well. We have a unified storage piece that Broadcom does not quite have and can be included as part of our portfolio. So there are places where we can differentiate. We are embracing hybrid cloud. Broadcom is saying all private cloud. So these are differences, and it’s those differences where I think we can focus on winning footprint in these very large places where we get a piece of the estate, not the whole estate.
Incentives That Nutanix Will Offer The Channel
We have significant incentives for them to sign up with Nutanix to capture new logos. They get a disproportionate amount of payout when they actually capture net-new logos for us. Like I said, they may be in their accounts already. They know those customers really well, and if they can bring them to us, they make a lot more money. So it’s all about enabling them. It’s about giving them the right incentives, both on the front end and the back end.