Time to Virtualize the Entire Data Center

In this replay of Bank of America Securities’ June 30, 2020 “View from Top, CEO Insight Call,” Senior Tech Analyst Wamsi Mohan talks with Pandey about Nutanix’s products and services, its prospects in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, marketshare and the competitive landscape.

By Ken Kaplan

By Ken Kaplan July 24, 2020

The key idea behind data center virtualization has been “no change to the application, no change to the operating system,” according to Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey, in an investor call with Bank of America Securities.

This has been the philosophy behind the shift to virtual machines and as well as in storage, Pandey said. 

“I think we now have to virtualize the entire data center and use lift and shift with this assertion: no change to the application, no change to the operating system. But now there's a third one, no change to IT workflows.”

This set up his vision for how Nutanix helps businesses and organizations move to hybrid cloud IT, where on-premises data centers and multiple public cloud services combine seamlessly. Making all of these technologies work together seamlessly is one of the IT industry’s biggest challenges in decades.

In this replay of Bank of America Securities’ June 30, 2020 “View from Top, CEO Insight Call,” Bank of America Senior Tech Analyst Wamsi Mohan talks with Pandey about Nutanix’s products and services, its prospects in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, marketshare and the competitive landscape. Pandey explains the company’s strategies to service clients in whatever cloud environment they work in from public clouds to private clouds and hybrid clouds.

When asked about the company’s subscription model Pandey painted the picture of three main factors in enterprise software. 

“One of the trifectas that will define the computing architecture for the enterprise will be 'laws of the land,’” he said. “Compliance and sovereignty is king, especially as we see globalization being redefined in the last three years.”

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Then there are laws of physics, Pandey said. 

“If you're going to generate a kind of data at the edge, then you cannot backhaul all that stuff to a large data center.”  

And third, he cited the laws of economics. 

"There are things that are predictable that are much cheaper to own than to rent,” Pandey added. 

“We have built an amazingly agnostic architecture with subscription, where we don't care. And our sellers wouldn't care whether our licenses are being run on prem or off prem. And in many ways, the thing is going to come back to, business wise, do we have an architecture that will not take sides, and whether it's going to run at the edge, run in the private cloud or on the public health.”

Editor’s note: Also find a replay of Bank of America Securities’ June 30, 2020 “View from Top, CEO Insight Call,” on the Nutanix Investor Relations site.

Ken Kaplan is Editor in Chief for The Forecast by Nutanix. Find him on Twitter @kenekaplan.

Jason Lopez contributed to this story.

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