

When Nutanix Inc. released Acropolis, its turnkey solution for managing the hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI, two years ago, the promotional messaging around the technology included the word “simplicity” in nearly every other sentence. Fast forward to 2017, and the message is still the same.
“We believe that making things simple for our customers does not stop at the hyperconverged world,” said Venugopal Pai (pictured), vice president of alliances and business development at Nutanix. “It starts bleeding into all the things that make operational complexity a burden for our customers so they can focus on their business.”
Pai visited theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante) during VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed the Acropolis product, its channel partner strategy and a one-click approach to cloud infrastructure. (* Disclosure below.)
A simple approach to visualization and application mobility in the enterprise seems to be working well for the company, which went public one year ago. Revenues are up 61 percent year over year, and adoption of Acropolis has also risen to 24 percent of nodes according to Pai.
“We are very much aligned with where the world is going, a hybrid cloud, multicloud world,” he said. “Everything needs to be software defined, and the architecture that’s underneath that needs to be invisible to customers.”
The company has actively pursued a multifaceted go-to-market strategy that includes a major reliance on channel partners. Nutanix has no direct sales arm, so the channel drives growth. And customer conversations increasingly focus on how the company works with other firms in the multicloud space, including VMware Inc.
“Customers recognize that we’re not the only game in town,” Pai explained. “They want us to partner with their strategic vendors and technology partners.”
Nutanix frequently uses a catch phrase — “One OS, One Click” — to define its single software fabric for public and private clouds. “You can start small and still go from 300 to 3,000 to 30,000 [users] with just a plug-and-play architecture and a one-click upgrade of the software stack,” Pai said. “That is the simplicity we want to bring to our customers.”
Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Nutanix Inc. have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)
THANK YOU