As competition between Nutanix, Inc. and VMware, Inc. heats up for market share over the growing data of apps and cloud utilization, prospective and existing users are looking to each company’s game-plans to gauge the coming changes.

Howard Ting, chief marketing officer of Nutanix, met with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during this year’s Nutanix .NEXT Conference to talk about this competition, as well as Nutanix’s view of the future and cloud opportunities.

Numbers and separate clouds

Looking at the turn-out for the event, Ting noted that they had more than doubled attendance from last year, a rise he described as “very humbling.” But he also pointed out that sheer numbers were not the only part to be considered in Nutanix’s market strategy. “We have to not just extend the presence of the brand, but control its perception,” he said.

Turning his attention to the next few years, Ting laid out Nutanix’s assessment of where things were going. “We believe that in the future, there won’t be public or enterprise cloud, but just one cloud,” he said. “We want to bring seamless application mobility between these environments. … In the future, we want to deliver between private and public clouds and between different public clouds.”

Part of the motivation behind this aim to bring the two environments together was drawn from the disparity between their qualities, Ting said. “There’s such a big disparity between the agility … the automation that’s available, and we believe we can close that gap between the private and public clouds.”

Leading changes

But to get to these changes in the future, Nutanix is considering its own past. “In the early years of selling our product, we were probably being brought in by a lot of virtualization teams,” Ting recalled, comparing those times to the current situation. “The first couple of years, it was all about selling to the virtualization teams. … more recently, we’re selling higher up in the organization.”

And the changing nature of data services means that storage-focused buyers are finding new reasons to choose cloud. “We still obviously have to get to the storage folks … [but] the majority of the time now, they embrace the movement, they’re not fighting it like they were,” Ting pointed out.

Staying sharp

As the interview shifted to the topic of Nutanix and VMware sparring for market space, Ting remained positive. “The competitive environment’s clearly getting intense,” he said, but he made it clear that Nutanix was ready for that situation. “We welcome the competition. … I’m glad that everyone’s joining the party, and this is the place to be.”

Picking out a few examples of ways in which Nutanix is keeping customers’ attention, Ting highlighted how cluster upgrades can be a stumbling point for customers, introducing significant delays to their workloads, but Nutanix “can do it with one click, and we can do it without ever taking that environment down. That’s why customers love Nutanix.”

Ting continued: “Our relationship with VMware is one that is obviously mixed,” Ting said. He also felt that “there are many times where we’re very complementary. … We have to ensure that our customers have successful deployments running Nutanix on top of VMX.”

Above all, he felt, “We have to stay hungry and humble and honest” as Nutanix begins its “transformation from a product company to a platform company.”

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE