Rajiv Ramaswami, President & CEO of Nutanix, outlines the company’s multicloud and AI strategy, highlighting sovereign cloud readiness, Kubernetes adoption, seamless VMware migration, and increased regional investment as Middle Eastern enterprises accelerate modernization and demand secure, flexible, future‑ready infrastructure.
Nutanix pioneered hyperconverged infrastructure. How has the company evolved since then?
Nutanix began by redefining the data center through hyperconverged infrastructure, unifying compute, storage, and networking into a single software‑defined platform. Sixteen years later, that foundation remains central to the company’s identity, but Nutanix has expanded far beyond its origins. Today, it delivers a full multicloud platform that supports both traditional virtualized applications and modern, cloud‑native workloads. The platform now spans compute, storage, networking, orchestration, and integrated security, while also supporting external storage arrays such as Dell PowerFlex and Pure Storage. Nutanix has extended its capabilities across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and has introduced the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform and Nutanix AI to support containerized and AI‑driven applications. The evolution reflects a commitment to customer choice, operational simplicity, and long‑term architectural flexibility.
With cloud‑native and AI workloads accelerating, how is Nutanix preparing customers for the future?
The industry is rapidly shifting toward cloud‑native architectures, containerization, and AI‑powered applications, and Nutanix is positioning itself as the platform that unifies these environments. Every generative AI workload ultimately runs on Kubernetes, which is why Nutanix built a full‑fledged Kubernetes platform and a turnkey AI stack that simplifies deployment, scaling, and operations. The company’s vision is to provide a unified platform for both today’s virtualized applications and tomorrow’s AI‑driven, containerized workloads, whether they run in data centers, at the edge, in sovereign clouds, or in public clouds. Customers choose where to run their applications, and Nutanix ensures consistency, security, and operational simplicity across all environments.
Nutanix now serves nearly 30,000 customers. What’s driving this growth?
Nutanix’s growth is driven by organizations modernizing their infrastructure and seeking alternatives to legacy virtualization platforms. The company offers a simple, scalable, and cost‑efficient path forward, especially as customers evaluate their options following the Broadcom‑VMware acquisition. Nutanix provides the easiest migration path, enabling workloads to move without modifying the application itself. The company adds between 600 and 700 new customers every quarter, and its ARR recently grew by 18 percent. Roughly half of the Global 2000 now rely on Nutanix, supported by a sustained commitment to innovation and significant reinvestment into research and development.
You mentioned culture as a differentiator. What defines Nutanix’s approach?
Nutanix’s culture is built around customer obsession, long‑term thinking, collaboration, and distributed ownership. Every employee is accountable for customer success, regardless of their role. The company prioritizes long‑term relationships over transactional engagements and operates as a unified global team. Employees are empowered to take ownership and drive outcomes. This culture is reflected in Nutanix’s Net Promoter Score of 90, sustained for a decade — one of the highest in the industry — and a strong indicator of customer trust and satisfaction.
Sovereignty is a major priority in the region. How does Nutanix support sovereign cloud requirements?
Sovereignty encompasses localization, self‑reliance, and data protection, and Nutanix addresses each of these layers through its platform. The company enables customers to localize models, train them in local languages, and deploy them in secure, isolated environments. Nutanix builds on open‑source foundations such as KVM and Kubernetes, enhancing them to meet mission‑critical standards. It also supports fully air‑gapped deployments, sovereign cloud providers, private data centers, and hybrid models. Every SaaS‑based capability is available in an on‑prem, air‑gapped version, ensuring that customers can operate with complete autonomy and compliance.
How do you help customers navigate complex regional regulations and compliance requirements?
Infrastructure teams carry much of the responsibility for compliance, and Nutanix provides policy‑driven controls that allow operators to enforce data isolation, model access rules, and workload placement. For AI specifically, many organizations will consume rather than build models. Nutanix enables them to download open‑source models such as Llama or Mistral, run them securely, and ensure that fine‑tuned models never leave their environment. This creates a built‑in kill switch because the model is fully isolated, giving customers complete control over their intellectual property and data.
With so much unstructured data, how should organizations approach data cleansing for AI?
Organizations typically adopt a hybrid approach to data cleansing. Some rely on structured processes to select and prepare specific datasets before feeding them into models, while others use AI‑assisted summarization tools to identify relevant information from large volumes of unstructured data. Nutanix does not build data‑cleaning tools, but its infrastructure supports both approaches securely and efficiently, ensuring that customers can prepare their data in a way that aligns with their operational and compliance needs.
The Middle East is seeing massive data center expansion. How do you view the region’s sovereign compute capacity?
The region’s ambition is striking, with large‑scale projects such as the 8‑gigawatt solar farm outside Dubai demonstrating the scale of investment. The world will require enormous compute capacity for AI, and the Middle East is positioning itself as a major hub. While global capacity is growing rapidly, the real question is how quickly enterprises will build ROI‑driven AI applications to consume it. Early use cases such as customer support, document summarization, and software development run efficiently on small clusters. More advanced multi‑agent systems will emerge over time, driving higher compute demand and validating the region’s long‑term infrastructure investments.
How is Nutanix helping build local talent in the region?
Nutanix works closely with government entities and enterprises to develop local cloud and AI skills. Its certification and education programs train teams to operate modern cloud infrastructure and build AI‑enabled applications. The company also designs its platform to be simple and intuitive, reducing operational complexity so teams can focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management. This combination of upskilling and simplification helps bridge the talent gap and accelerates digital transformation across the region.
How does Nutanix ensure customers are not locked in?
Nutanix believes customers should stay because they want to, not because they are forced to. The company offers flexible subscription terms, portable licenses that can move across on‑prem, sovereign clouds, and public clouds, and choice at every layer of the stack — from hypervisors and hardware vendors to GPUs, Kubernetes distributions, and cloud providers. This flexibility is a core part of the Nutanix value proposition and a key reason customers continue to adopt the platform.
