Most technology executives would be quite satisfied to build a business in 10 years with more than 5,000 employees, 14,000 customers, at least $1 billion in annual revenue, and become an established, publicly traded company. Most executives aren’t Dheeraj Pandey.

As the chairman and chief executive officer of Nutanix Inc., Pandey (pictured) has guided his firm to become a leader in cloud software for the hyperconverged infrastructure since he co-founded it in 2009. Although the company has become an established player in the enterprise computing industry, with 810 of the Global 2000 customers, don’t tell Pandey that it’s time to savor success. Nutanix might as well be just another startup trying to survive.

“Ten years is an era; we’ve built a family of customers and employees and partners,” Pandey said. “Yet it feels like we haven’t achieved a thing. The more I make it look like 2010 again, we can go back to being like a startup and growing from here.”

Pandey spoke with Stu Miniman and Rebecca Knight, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the .NEXT Europe event in Copenhagen, Denmark. They discussed how Pandey is reshaping the company for the future, its strategic direction, Nutanix’s continued transformation to a subscription model and the value of customer experience (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE features Dheeraj Pandey as its Guest of the Week.

Moving applications

To understand more fully how Pandey is reshaping Nutanix and its hyperconvergence technology, as well as gain better insight into the firm’s strategic roadmap, it’s helpful to look back at the new products and updates that the company unveiled at its .NEXT event in May.

At its major event in Anaheim, California, Nutanix announced Xi Clusters, which lets customers run Nutanix software on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s EC2 native environments. That allows users to move applications without network reconfiguration, the kind of mobility feature for workloads in the hybrid cloud that independent-minded enterprise developers find appealing.

“When you brought data close to applications, the application people became autonomous,” Pandey said. “That was the power of hyperconvergence; you were able to provide performance to data and machines, and you were able to provide performance to people because they became autonomous. That is not changing even in the hyperscale or data center environment.”

Hypervisior potential

Nutanix also rolled out updates for Xi Frame earlier this year, a Desktop-as-a-Service product that can be used to provision Windows or Linux systems on-premises or in a public cloud. The updates allow for major flexibility in the placement of virtualized desktop workloads in the cloud or native on-premises Nutanix AHV hypervisor deployments.

There was another bit of significant news that followed the Xi Frame release. In August, Nutanix received “in process” designation for the Federal Risk and Authorization Program, or FedRAMP, for Xi Frame to help government customers manage sensitive cloud resources.

By operating Xi Frame within AWS and Microsoft Azure regions designed to support the U.S. government, it appears that Nutanix is building a potentially important piece of public sector business.

“The hypervisor is now an app because it can run in the AWS platform, it can run on the Azure platform,” Pandey explained. “In that sense, I don’t look at the platform as a zero-sum game for us. We just have to look at it as a platform where our apps can actually go and run.”

Platform value

That notion of platform is key to the Nutanix strategy. In a recent interview following the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, Pandey trumpeted a major deal with a Fortune 25 customer that he would only characterize as a “software-defined infrastructure player.”

In his description of gaining the new customer’s business, Pandey said the firm selected the Nutanix platform because its AHV virtualization platform could power enterprise infrastructure across the U.S. If Nutanix can successfully position its software to handle seamless integration between servers, storage and networking, it will have defined its value in the multicloud world.

“When VMware was building virtualization, the server market was $55 billion, storage was $30 billion, networking was $25 billion,” Pandey said. “Right now, we’re thinking that these are the new platform. Where is the value in virtualizing, simplifying and integrating them all with a layer of software that becomes the new integration for all things multicloud?”

Becoming pure software

Nutanix’s traction with large enterprise customers has been fueled by one of the fastest pivots in quite a while. Until two years ago, Nutanix was primarily an appliance provider, selling combined server and storage hardware to corporate data centers. By its third quarter 2019 earnings release in May, the company was already within 15% of its long-term target for subscription billings.

Today, Nutanix is what Pandey describes as a “pure software” company, ready to offer a virtualization platform for the hybrid and multicloud world. By changing its business model from hardware to software, Nutanix can be anywhere customers want it to be.

“The very fact that we’ve decoupled the entitlement from hardware was the first change for us, the fact that software can live anywhere,” Pandey said. “It provides a very agile, procurement framework that is new to the world of infrastructure. You will see more of the consumption model changed towards subscription in the coming years.”

With the change in its model, Nutanix had to weather some challenges of its own. Recent data showed that Dell Technologies Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. have gained hyperconverged market ownership at the expense of Pandey’s company.

The transition to a subscription business has also hurt earnings and share price. At one point, after a disappointing earnings release earlier this year, the company’s stock lost 60% of its value and has been hovering around $25 per share.

Another possible change on the horizon for the company is that it could get acquired. The combination of a volatile stock price combined with signs that it’s making the transition to a more robust software model successfully could entice a number of suitors, with Google LLC being viewed as a strong possibility. Nutanix’s chief product officer left to join Google Cloud, and a top Google executive was recently appointed to the Nutanix board.

For Pandey, an experienced Silicon Valley technologist who dropped out of a Ph.D. program at the University of Texas to pursue his career, it’s all part of looking back at his company’s first decade and understanding that it’s not about what product a customer actually buys but the experience they receive.

“How do you not sell things, but sell an experience?” Pandey asked. “It’s very important to differentiate the two. The job of integration and to really sell an experience has to be left-shifted to a company like us, and that’s what we’ve been doing with our products.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the .NEXT Europe event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for .NEXT Europe. Neither Nutanix, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE