Nutanix Revenues Jump 67 Percent in Q3 Thanks To Platform And Customer Expansion
Hyper-converged infrastructure technology pioneer Nutanix on Thursday reported significant revenue growth that caused a collective cheer in the investment community. At 7:10 p.m. EDT, the company's shares were up $2.73 (15.54%) to $20.30 in after-hours trading.
Despite the stock price jump, Nutanix is still well off its 52-week high of $46.78, reached in October right after its IPO.
[Related: Nutanix Brings Its HCI Software To HPE Servers, Adds New Appliance Rental Option]
Nutanix reported GAAP loss for the quarter of $112.0 million, or 78 cents per share, on revenue of $191.8 million for its third fiscal quarter of 2017, which ended April 30. The company reported a GAAP loss of $46.8 million, or 39 cents a share, on revenues of $114.7 million during the year-ago quarter.
On a non-GAAP basis, Nutanix lost $60.8 million in the quarter, or 42 cents per share, compared to last year's loss of $40.4 million, or 33 cents per share, last year.
Nutanix picked up 790 new customers in the quarter, bringing its total customer count to 6,172 businesses, the company said. New customers were most focused on the Nutanix architecture for running enterprise application, virtual desktop infrastructure, and server virtualization or private cloud workloads, it said.
Based on a rolling four-quarter average, about 23 percent of Nutanix customers have adopted the company's AHV hypervisor, formerly known as Acropolis.
The company was also able to expand its total addressable market thanks to making its hyper-converged infrastructure software stack available on an ever-wider range of hardware platforms, said CEO Dheeraj Pandey in a prepared statement.
"We continue to execute on our strategy of building a cloud operating system that provides our customers maximum choice of hardware platforms. We recently established a partnership with IBM to bring to market the industry’s first hyper-converged solution on Power Systems, and introduced support for HPE ProLiant and Cisco UCS blade servers. Our third quarter results reflect our continued focus on the Global 2000 as well as a measurable improvement in the number of larger deals in the quarter, particularly in North America," Pandey said.
Nutanix early this month said it is making its software stack available for deployment by channel partners on Hewlett Packard Enterprise ProLiant servers and is expanding that same capability to Cisco's UCS B-series of blade servers for the first time.
However, rather than working in partnership with HPE and Cisco, both of which have their own hyper-converged infrastructure solutions, these are defined as "meet-in-the-channel" initiatives under which channel partners deploy the software on the servers in the field with no support from the hardware vendors.
Nutanix and IBM this month also unveiled a technology relationship under which IBM will sell new turnkey appliances consisting of IBM Power-based servers and Nutanix's software stack, with an emphasis on mission-critical applications running in Linux environments.
Nutanix said it expects fourth-quarter revenue to be between $215 million and $220 million, compared to $139.8 million in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2016. The company said it also expects a non-GAAP loss of 38 cents per share. Nutanix did not previously publish earlier comparative financial information given its recent IPO on September 30.