Nutanix Inc. wrapped its conference in Vienna, Austria, this week on the heels of its successful IPO. Valued at over $3 billion, the hyper-converged infrastructure company is poised to become the leader in its market. However, stiff competition from other players, as well as friction with partners, threaten to throw a wrench in its plans.

As the event wound down, Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, outlined Nutanix’s strategy for growth. Its announcement of the 5.0 release, he said, shows them “moving from storage through the virtualization layer, through cloud, as what they positioned as enterprise cloud.”

The company claims that its enterprise cloud is capable of delivering cloud services to customers on their own specific terms, Miniman said.

VMware: Ally or arch rival?

According to most accounts, VMware’s vSAN hyper-converged infrastructure still has more customers then Nutanix; however, Nutanix enjoys greater raw revenue, Miniman stated.

“I think it’s over 70 percent of Nutanix customers still run VMware Inc., and the corporate relationship between VMware and Nutanix is a difficult one,” he said. “As Nutanix expands what they want to do, how will that bump up and put them into contention with what VMware’s doing?”

The price of pioneering

Nutanix’s synergy with Cisco Systems Inc. is also under stress thanks to some bold steps off the beaten path.

“Nutanix expanded what they are supporting on Cisco. They are now supporting blade servers and claim to be the first and only hyper-converged company that can offer their solution on blade servers. Cisco is not exactly on board with this engagement,” Miniman explained.

*Disclosure: Nutanix Inc. and other companies sponsor some Nutanix 2016 .NEXT Europe segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Nutanix nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Nutanix 2016 .NEXT Europe.

Photo by SiliconANGLE