Looking back, Paul Updike can trace his career to a failed product. He’s seen many of them, spanning four decades, which can be like dog years in the world of IT. He’s witnessed what can go wrong when an IT team gets locked into a particular technology.
In the early 1980s, before Updike became a teenager, Texas Instruments produced a short-lived line of personal computers. The machines sold millions of units at first, but other machines like Commodore and Apple became more popular. One day while strolling through a Kmart store, Updike convinced his parents to buy him the 16-bit TI-99/4A. The steeply discounted sale price of $50 made it a steal.
“I wanted a computer so badly,” recalled Updike, a senior director of technical marketing engineering at Nutanix, in an interview with The Forecast.
“My dad spent most of his career as an engineer at IBM, so it runs in the family. But it was luck and coincidence, and essentially a failed product from Texas Instruments, that got me into computers at an early age.”
It wasn’t just competition that doomed the TI-99/4A. Part of the blame falls on Texas Instruments’ decision to control the development of software for the machine. The company offered only around 300 titles, which didn’t include many of the most popular programs, and so buyers went elsewhere. It was an early example of what Updike calls a common mistake among tech vendors: attempting to corner the market by locking customers into a closed ecosystem.
“I’m old enough to remember when ‘open systems’ was the word of the day,” Updike said.
“It was the idea that you could have an operating system that would support other people’s applications, and you could run software made by companies other than the one that you bought the computer from.”
Though the open systems concept is decades old, Updike notes many vendors still resist the impulse to wall off their environments. But the companies that embrace open platforms, he says, are the ones that endure.
Looking Through the Customer’s Eyes
Since his days writing code on his TI-99/4A, Updike has spent more than four decades in technology. He landed his first IT job more for his large frame than his tech skills.
“My boss needed somebody who could pick up boxes so that he wouldn’t have to do it anymore,” he recalled with a chuckle.
Before joining Nutanix more than a decade ago, he worked in advisory and engineering roles for the storage vendor NetApp for more than 12 years, preceded by stints as a systems administrator for various companies in the 1990s.
Updike left NetApp partly because he felt the storage market had matured. He arrived at Nutanix just before flash memory disrupted the storage market, illustrating the unpredictability of IT evolution. Pivoting from hardware to software-defined infrastructure brought him closer to understanding the needs of IT decision-makers and practitioners.
“For me, Nutanix opened up a whole world of being more customer-focused and application-focused,” Updike says.
“When you level up where you sit in the stack from storage to compute, you start to appreciate customer problems in a whole different light. I used to only care about the characteristics of a workload. Now, I’m more involved with specific applications and what those applications are doing for the customer.”
While Nutanix made its name with hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) combining storage, networking, and compute, Updike saw many customers wanted to keep existing storage solutions. Rather than lock customers into a particular architecture, Nutanix took an open-platform approach. That continues today as Nutanix partners with Nvidia, Intel, Cisco, and other major IT innovators. For example, since partnering with Pure Storage in 2025, IT teams can use Nutanix Cloud Platform-powered HCI systems with Pure Storage’s high-performance, all-flash arrays.
“Solving a customer problem doesn’t mean solving it with only your technology,” Updike said.
“It would be silly to tell customers they have to live completely within our environment. So, we did the hardest thing: We told them, ‘You don’t have to buy the original thing we built.’”
A ‘Full Circle Moment’
Updike has witnessed a parade of innovation, from storage to HCI, hybrid multicloud, and enterprise AI. Rather than linear progression, he sees repeating cycles.
“My dad went through the first real automation change,” Updike recalled.
“I grew up with robot arms on the kitchen counter. Now, with AI, we’re going through another giant transition where people are asking when to build and when to automate.”
Another repeating cycle: the push and pull between closed systems and open platforms. He sees the industry bringing a wave of platform environments that tear down walls, letting data flow where needed.
“Platforms shouldn’t be locked-in collections of services,” he says. “They can span and interact with other vendors’ services.”
With information moving between systems, data sovereignty becomes critical, Updike said. He pointed to scenarios where physical purchases like cars are “bricked” due to software or data-access issues.
“Tech companies have to make money, but not by exploiting customer data,” he said. “Nutanix lets people encrypt their data, but it’s always theirs.”
Ultimately, Updike believes the next IT era will be defined by architectures providing optionality, choice, and flexibility.
“It’s a full-circle moment for me,” he says.
“I left traditional storage because it felt stagnant. Now, we aren’t just fighting the old way; we’re absorbing it. We’re moving from a monolithic stack to a world where you consume the services you need, on the hardware you want, on your own terms.”
Related:
IT Teams Design for Geopatriation and Data Sovereignty
Hybrid Multicloud Boosts Digital Transformation
How Cloud Native AI is Driving Enterprise Transformation
Calvin Hennick is a contributing writer. His work appears in BizTech, Engineering Inc., The Boston Globe Magazine and elsewhere. He is also the author of Once More to the Rodeo: A Memoir. Find him on LinkedIn.
Ken Kaplan, editor in chief for The Forecast by Nutanix, and Jason Lopez, executive producer of Tech Barometer podcasts, contributed to this story.
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