Investors may be asking questions about Nutanix, Inc.’s initial public offering prospects, but its strategy looks as solid as ever. As the Nutanix .NEXT conference debuts this week in Las Vegas, expect the company to unleash a flood of new product announcements – a staple at past .NEXT events – and to continue to beat the drum on its themes of scalability, simplicity and choice.

A lot has changed since last June’s .NEXT, not the least of which is that Dell Inc., Nutanix’s biggest OEM partner, announced plans to acquire EMC. EMC’s VCE subsidiary makes a computing hyper-converged platform called VxRail, and Dell hasn’t publicly stated whether it will choose between the two options or continue to sell both. Regardless of what Dell decides, Nutanix will be looking to hedge its bets with other hardware partners and bulk up its software business.

One key factor in Dell’s decision could be VMware, Inc., a part of the EMC Federation that is both a Nutanix partner and also increasingly a rival. Nutanix is leaving little doubt that it wants a piece of VMware’s market. In February it announced a software update to its Acropolis hypervisor platform that makes it simpler for customers to bring over VMware-virtualized workloads. The update also improved price-performance fourfold, the company said.

Just last month the company also announced a push into the small and midsize business market with an entry-level model of its hyper-converged lineup that starts at $25,000. While there’s plenty of competition that space, the company’s reputation for simplicity and scale-out growth should make it an important new player.

On the offensive

Nutanix has earned a reputation as an aggressive company the backs of his promises with delivery. “Nutanix is accelerating all the things that VMware is slow-rolling,” said Wikibon Chief Analyst David Vellante, summing up the action at last year’s .NEXT 2015.

And its story is resonating as IT executives face increasing budget pressure and user demand. Recent Wikibon research on the emerging class of “server SAN (storage-area network)” architectures found that customers are consistently reporting savings of 50 percent or more on administration costs with hyper-converged infrastructure compared to distributed storage and computing, while also improving uptime and flexibility.

“A Nutanix service provider customer told us that they were able to consolidate 10 racks of servers and Fibre Channel SAN storage down to a fraction of a rack of Nutanix gear,” wrote Wikibon Analyst Stuart Miniman (@stu). “The personnel managing the gear was also reduced from 10 to one,” and provisioning times fell from more than one week to a couple of hours with better uptime.

Miniman told SiliconANGLE that the market still doesn’t appreciate the power of the Nutanix architecture. “When most analyst firms say hyper-convergence, they talk about boxes that put storage and server together,” he said, “but the future is about distributed architectures and software that converts from bespoke pieces, such as server and storage, to a pool of distributed resources through hyper-converged appliances. It’s not about the box, it’s about the new software architecture that enables these pools.”

Miniman believes Nutanix’s strategy goes far beyond storage to taking “as big a part of the infrastructure as VMware does. Nutanix thinks virtualization is a feature,” he added. “They consider themselves to be a software company. Most industry watchers don’t get that.”

That strategy makes sense in a world in which hardware is increasingly a commodity. Although Nutanix’s core business is to sell devices that combine hardware, storage and networking into a scalable “cloud in a box,” there’s no reason its software needs to be tied to a particular device.

Nutanix made that clear in May of last year when it debuted a standalone version of its converged stack that customers can download to try on their own servers. The door is thus open for other data center hardware makers such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Cisco Systems Inc. to become partners.

Wither IPO?

So if the future looks so rosy, why isn’t Nutanix a public company yet? The company filed an S-1 statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in December, stating that it was seeking to raise $200 million. Then it surprised investors three weeks ago by taking out a $75 million line of credit with The Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which is its chief underwriter on its initial public offering (IPO).

Some market-watchers have clucked that the loan is a sign that Nutanix’s burn rate is too high, but Miniman thinks it’s a matter of timing. Noting that the company reported $102.7 million in revenue for the three-month period ending Jan. 31, an 81 percent increase over the same period a year ago, he asserted “The bottom fell out of the market in December.” With tech companies starting to creep back into the IPO waters, Nutanix is likely to be among the first in line to try again.

theCUBE will provide two full days of coverage from Nutanix .NEXT beginning tomorrow. Catch the interviews and action from the stage at SiliconANGLE.tv. Here’s more information on how you can follow the event.

Feature image via Nutanix