Nutanix sees growth in Indian markets through 'hybrid cloud'

The Silicon Valley firm evolved from the need to make a lot of data centre infrastructure invisible for businesses that didn't want IT as their core focus back in 2009

Eighteen months after their entry into India, enterprise cloud solutions provider Nutanix is managing projects for the government, big-ticket IT companies and financial service providers through a host of services to reduce their dependence on core infrastructure.

In a country where the public cloud services market is expected to grow 43 per cent in 2017 to total $1.9 billion (Rs 123,661 crore), Nutanix claims to streamline this infrastructure requirement with their hybrid solutions.

The Silicon Valley-based firm evolved from the need to make a lot of data centre infrastructure invisible for businesses that didn’t want IT as their core focus back in 2009.

“The business and technology ecosystem in India tends to skip generations when it comes to adopting innovation. Yes, we are at a nascent stage here but considering our global presence and the speed with which Indian businesses are adopting digital services, we are positive about our growth,” said Dheeraj Pandey, CEO and co-founder, Nutanix.

Nutanix and Dell EMC remain neck and neck in IDC’s global rankings for Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI), which is a hybrid that integrates storage, virtualisation and networking solutions into single hardware components.

“Ongoing new entries into the public cloud-managed service provider and migration services space indicate continued overall growth. Hybrid cloud solutions will continue to drive overall cloud adoption and overall infrastructure as a service (IaaS) trajectory at the same rate as past quarters,” said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner.

The highest growth will continue to be driven by IaaS, which is projected to grow 42 per cent in 2017, followed by 33.5 per cent in platform as a service (PaaS) and 33.3 per cent in software as a service (SaaS).

While most of their initial traction came from IT and ITeS providers, banks and financial service providers (including NSE) soon adopted their solutions with telecom and retail finally warming up to the change in recent times. This was accompanied by gradual movement from metro cities where they first introduced enterprise solutions to rapid expansion into clients in as far as tier-II cities. They have grown to 300-plus clients and over 600 employees at their core development centre in Bengaluru.

The core solution Nutanix provides is called a “hybrid cloud” which offers businesses the the flexibility of public cloud platforms in terms of storage and access while also allowing them to customise the system for their applications. “If Apple changed the way people consume music then we did the same for storage by turning it into an application,” Nag said. The company is going to take on cloud, security and network infrastructure next through integrated solutions that will reduce dependence on independent resources for each of the categories.

“If I am an e-commerce company with a huge presence across the country, I will eventually need to scale up my IT services to manage the influx of orders. What if I could just automate a lot of the low competency work to software that will allow me to utilize my resources effectively?” said Anjan Srinivas, Senior director and product manager at Nutanix. He sees a similar graph for startups that might not require their services initially but once they reach a certain scale, they’ll find it simpler to just opt for “invisible infra”.

The company has been gradually building a presence in the enterprise solutions market through strategic partnerships with Indian partners like NextGen and NetMagic apart from an array of resellers and OEM partners like Dell, IBM and Lenovo even as they compete with products from these organizations. Nutanix has recently won contracts to facilitate Rajasthan government’s Esign project apart from a few other government initiatives and see opportunities with the government as an area of growth with a dedicated team handling the same.