The Total Economic Impact™ of Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)
A Forrester TEI Study on Cost Savings and Benefits
What This Study Means for You
The Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study examines the financial benefits of Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), a hybrid cloud platform that allows organizations to seamlessly migrate workloads to public clouds, like AWS bare-metal, without rearchitecting or refactoring applications.
This report is ideal for IT decision-makers, cloud architects, and infrastructure leaders facing impending deadlines to exit datacenters or staggering increases in legacy virtualization platform software license fees.
By addressing pain points like stalled, multi-year cloud migrations and the heavy capital expenditure of hardware refreshes, NC2 enables a fast, predictable operating expense model. It provides a single control plane across on-premises and cloud environments, allowing teams to reduce silos, avoid vendor lock-in, and simplify operations.
What You’ll Learn:
Enhanced Efficiency: How NC2 on AWS achieves 50% ROI, $7.6M in benefits and $2.5M NPV over three years for a composite organization.
Reduced Licensing Costs: Reductions in virtualization software licensing costs by $1.1 million through rightsizing cores and moving away from expensive legacy contracts.
Eliminated Hardware CapEx: Avoidance of $1.5 million in capital expenditures and associated maintenance through the elimination of on-premises hardware.
Boosted Efficiency: Key time savings of up to 34% in virtualization platform tasks, saving teams 2,600 hours per year in provisioning, patching, and monitoring.
Accelerated Time to Cloud: Rapid migration timelines completed in as quickly as 5 days, opposed to the months typically required to refactor applications for cloud-native environments.
Benefits of Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)
As organizations face pricing pressures from their virtualization platform vendors, they are looking for quick paths to migrate to the public cloud without locking into a single provider. This approach requires platforms that deliver a common operating model and unified management across both on-premises and public cloud environments.
Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) is a hybrid cloud platform that extends Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) directly to public clouds like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud and OVHcloud. By delivering operational consistency across edge locations, datacenters, and public cloud regions, NC2 brings one platform for compute, storage, networking, and management.
Nutanix commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying NC2 on AWS. To understand the benefits, costs, and risks, Forrester interviewed multiple decision-makers with experience using NC2.
For this study, Forrester aggregated the experiences of the interviewees into a single composite organization: a US-based organization in a regulated industry, with revenue of $5B per year, migrating between 2,500 and 3,000 VMs under a very tight timeframe due to licensing constraints.
[We] could buy Nutanix with new hardware and it was 50% cheaper [than our previous provider]. So, if you start doing the math, we're going to save tens of millions of dollars over the long haul.
Recommended Resources
Accelerate Cloud Migrations with NC2 on AWS
What is Nutanix Cloud Clusters?
Experience NC2 in Action
Organizations are often forced to choose between the high risk and long timelines of refactoring apps for the cloud, or staying trapped in legacy on-premises environments. As detailed in the Forrester TEI study, NC2 allows organizations to lift and shift their workloads directly to AWS bare-metal instances in a matter of weeks, completely avoiding application refactoring.
Faced with escalating virtualization software costs and hardware refresh cycles, the composite organization in the Forrester study saw a 50% ROI and a payback period of less than six months. Quantified benefits included $1.5 million in annual savings from right-sizing licenses and replacing expensive virtualization contracts, as well as $1.1 million saved by moving from heavy capital expenditure to a predictable cloud operating expense model.
Managing separate environments for on-premises infrastructure and the public cloud creates silos and operational bottlenecks. NC2 provides a single, unified management plane. In the TEI study, this consolidated approach resulted in a 34% time savings for virtualization platform support teams, saving 2,600 hours annually on routine provisioning, patching, and monitoring.
NC2 brings operational consistency across on-premises datacenters, edge locations, and public cloud regions. According to the TEI study, this common operating model allows organizations to shift workloads between environments and rebalance based on cost, compliance, or regional needs—without retraining teams or refactoring apps. This strategic flexibility reduces long-term dependency on a single cloud vendor.
Many organizations struggle with hardware refresh cycles, supply chain delays, and datacenter maintenance. The Forrester study highlights that NC2 allows organizations to automatically replace and add bare-metal nodes in minutes, eliminating the need for engineers to manually rebuild hardware. This transition shifts heavy capital expenditures to a predictable operating expense model, saving the composite organization $3 million over three years.