Nutanix CEO Raises Outlook, Attributes ‘Substantial Pipeline’ Growth To Broadcom

‘All the actions of Broadcom have created a significant, multiyear opportunity for us to win new customers and to gain market share,’ Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami says. ‘The timing of these things and the magnitude is quite unpredictable. We have a substantial pipeline of opportunities.’

As rival VMware churns through its opening months under Broadcom ownership, Nutanix’s second-quarter revenue leaped 16 percent year over year and the company raised all of its guidance for the remaining two quarters.

“All the actions of Broadcom have created a significant, multiyear opportunity for us to win new customers and to gain market share,” Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said on the company’s second-quarter fiscal 2024 earnings call. “The timing of these things and the magnitude is quite unpredictable. We have a substantial pipeline of opportunities.”

Ramaswami said Nutanix is hoping to capitalize on the opportunity through a larger spend on advertising, making it profitable for partners to attract new business and helping existing VMware customers with migrations to Nutanix.

“We have been targeting more advertising dollars to maximizing awareness of Nutanix as the simplest, easiest viable alternative for these customers. No. 2, we have put in place incentives for our partners who are helping customers get to our platform. As partners bring new customers to us, we give them more incentives. We are also helping end customers with migration. When they have a VMware environment, and they are looking to bring our environment on, there’s a period of time where they may have dual operating costs and we try to help them out on that front.”

Ramaswami told investors he believes Nutanix is the easiest platform for customers who convert from VMware, with nearly identical offerings to Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation.

“If you compare the full stack with what Broadcom is offering with VMware Cloud Foundation, our Nutanix platform pretty much goes head to head against that,” he said in response to an analyst question. “We’ve got all the capabilities. We can handle all the workloads. We have a hybrid cloud solution. We have a modern edge platform that customers can run Kubernetes applications on. We have partnerships with Red Hat for OpenShift. We have partnerships with cloud partners Azure and AWS. From a capabilities and portfolio perspective, we are very much there.”

Nutanix’s second-quarter revenue came in $10 million higher than the company’s most optimistic guidance of $555 million, up 16 percent year over year to $565.2 million. Annual contract billings came in at $329.5 million compared with the high end of the $305 million Nutanix had modeled, while annual recurring revenue rose 25 percent to $1.74 billion.

“We delivered a solid second quarter with results that came in ahead of our expectations,” Ramaswami said. “We were happy to have exceeded all of our guided metrics.”

Nutanix CFO Rukmini Sivaraman said next quarter the company expects ACV billings of $265 million to $275 million, and revenue to come in between $510 million and $520 million during what is traditionally a slower quarter.

During the quarter, Nutanix won a seven-figure deal with an EMEA-based provider of automotive technology solutions. This customer had an existing three-tier footprint in need of a refresh but was frustrated by the prices of the incumbent vendor. A large North American hedge fund provided Nutanix another win, as did a global airline based in EMEA.

Ramaswami said it’s hard to predict how big a bump is coming and when from the disruption around VMware’s merger, with the complexity of migrations and long-term licensing all factoring into the calculation.

“What this event creates is an opportunity to speed that up. The TAM [total addressable market] and SAM [serviceable addressable market] haven’t changed, but now we are able to go after more of it quicker,” Ramaswami said. “The challenge of quantifying is that it’s very hard to predict how much of this is going to come how quickly. It’s a little early for us to say something. This certainly provides us with an opportunity to capture more of that market quicker, and I think we are moving as quick as we can.”

Nutanix’s GPT-in-a-Box product also scored “multiple additional wins” in the quarter, Ramaswami said.

“Interest remains high,” he said. “While it’s still early days, the numbers remain small. I’m excited about the long-term potential for GPT-in-a-Box.”