When a company’s business is software and support, they want to support a winner. Discovering those technologies and developers who are laying down the groundwork for the future is vital for companies who make their living through support and partnerships. Part of that new future is enterprise-level hybrid cloud services. The ecosystem around these technologies is still growing, but companies are taking sides, hoping to back the winner.

To gain some understanding of this growing market, Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, visited the Nutanix 2016 .NEXT Europe conference in Vienna, Austria. There, he spoke to Simon Taylor, president of Comtrade Software, which provides high availability monitoring and data protection that empowers IT staff and systems administrators to take back the data center.

From software to enterprise cloud

The discussion started as Taylor recounted Comtrade’s journey as it expanded its offerings into the hyper-converged and cloud space. From there, Comtrade saw the market was in the United States, and so it moved its headquarters to establish themselves in the US.

The key was finding the right industry leader to back. Comtrade found that leader in Nutanix Inc., Taylor said. “When we looked at the ecosystem and Nutanix, we said these guys have created a new industry,” he explained. He felt that Nutanix’s move into enterprise hyper-converged systems and hybrid cloud has made them an early leaders in this space.

Platform options and customer stories

Taylor related how Comtrade looked at the options in hyper-converged systems but saw Nutanix as the only real choice. He believed Nutanix was the platform to follow. It is big enough, they have growth, it just had an IPO, and he felt its executive team had a vision for building enterprise cloud. “That’s the vision we want to support,” Taylor said.

Things then turned toward what Taylor had seen on the convention floor. He recounted having chats with Nutanix customers who use Comtrade’s offerings to monitor everything under one pane of glass. He felt the interesting thing was that the more people were learning about Nutanix at the show, the more excitement and buzz existed within the community. People want to know how they can take advantage of Nutanix, he stated.

*Disclosure: Nutanix Inc. and other companies sponsor some Nutanix 2016 .NEXT Europe segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Nutanix nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE