Wall Street can be fickle when it comes to technology companies, but last week one analyst upgraded the outperform rating for Nutanix Inc. as it announced what might sound like a surprising public-cloud strategic alliance with Google Inc. But last year when the company’s chairman and chief executive officer, Dheeraj Pandey (pictured), led the initial public offering for Nutanix, he understood that in order to survive, change is constant and continual growth is necessary.

“From within the area where we innovate, that’s where velocity matters. The same thing is true for Wall Street as well. Wall Street is saying, ‘Look, as long as you can keep growing and grow wisely, I’m not going to touch you, actually,’” Pandey said.

While at the Nutanix .NEXT event in Washington, D.C. last week, hosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu) met with Pandey on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, to discuss the company’s successes and his vision of the future. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Dheeraj Pandey in our Guest of the Week feature.

Credit Suisse recently projected revenues for Nutanix at $762 million in fiscal year 2017 and upped that to $1.2 billion for fiscal year 2018. Industry analysts believe the partnership with Google is an opportunity for significant growth while capitalizing on the rising trend of enterprise hybrid cloud adoption.

New and existing customers of both Nutanix and Google will now have the ability to deploy and manage private cloud architectures and scalable public cloud environments with a single pane of glass. Tapping into Google Cloud Platform, the collaboration will enable customers to migrate between two cloud environments. In addition, pairing the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud and Google’s open-source initiative Kubernetes for container orchestration management will provide customers with the option to deploy, manage and scale container-based applications, Pandey explained.

Success factors and machine learning

On the heels of a successful conference last week loaded with new announcements and products, along with an uptick in its stock, Nutanix is moving forward to help the enterprise simplify the digital transformation. In an effort to move toward cognitive and machine learning, Pandey discussed the need to automate and go beyond hyperconverged infrastructure with one operating system and one-click solutions.

The Nutanix leader believes that in his business it is “growth at any cost.” Pandey shared a quote from the “The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth” that he feels defines the technology industry: “Growth creates complexity, and complexity is the silent killer of growth.” As such, Pandey is on a mission to create an invisible infrastructure that will reduce friction between humans and machines.

The Nutanix story is still evolving and Pandey’s destination is to simplify human–computer interaction, known as HCI, which is the study of the design and use of computer technology that is focused on the interfaces between users and computers. In a market where customers are struggling with converging clouds and devices with datacenters and how to meld operating expenses and capital expenditures, enterprise information technology consumers are looking for easy solutions. Nutanix recently launched its Xi Cloud Services with automatic provisioning and configuration for an integrated public cloud environment from its enterprise cloud.  

Pandey talked about the future and automation and said, “Automation has no finish line.” He theorized that there’s no finish line for what machines can do and that through machines and machine learning, the human mind is elevated.

“I think as machines do more, humans will also figure out a way to continue to do higher-level things, and not just within the realm of compute, virtualization, storage or networking or security, but also migration, portability. Application automation is a big part of it as well,” Pandey concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT US 2017 event. (*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Nutanix .NEXT US. Neither Nutanix Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE