Nutanix CEO Takes Shot At AWS & VMware Union

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendor Nutanix is positioning itself as a rival to the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS), claiming it is costly and difficult for companies to migrate all their workloads over to the public cloud.

Speaking at the vendor’s first European user conference, ‘.NEXT’ this week, Sunil Potti, Nutanix’s chief product development officer said that most workloads were around 30 percent ‘elastic’, but the majority were predictable workloads, and to maintain them in the public cloud isn’t cost-efficient.

“If you come to a city 300 days a year on business you may as well end up not renting hotel rooms, but instead buy a house,” he said.

Nutanix CEO speaks

Despite being a market leader in the HCI space, Nutanix has instead started describing itself as an “enterprise cloud” company.

In June, it launched its Enterprise Cloud Platform that lets companies’ data centres replicate the same level of automation as a public cloud, while its Prism management software affords firms more control over provisioning and managing apps and infrastructure.

Speaking to TechWeekEurope, Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey said AWS’ planned collaboration with VMware – which will allow VMware’s customers to run its software on AWS – “leaves a lot to be desired in terms of migration” in that the customer will still be left to do most of the legwork.

Pandey went so far as to dismiss Gartner’s naming of HPE, EMC and Nutanix as leaders in HCI systems in its 2016 Magic Quadrant (MQ): “The problem with companies like us is that we don’t belong in one [quadrant],” he said.

HCI growth

“Gartner’s MQs are always lagging…They cater for the Global 1000, and a lot of them come into innovation much later because they try to mitigate against risk, so [Gartner] writes for them, as opposed to the early adopters.”

Nutanix underwent an IPO in September, and Pandey believes the company must now avoid becoming a “soft” company: “I mean soft products that are not selling much, soft alliance announcements that are just fireworks in the night sky that have no relevance. A lot of times, this is something that happens when you become a public company.”

He said more-established companies often fall prey to “inefficiency, politics and complexity” and it was important to “keep making it simple.”

Gartner believes the market for HCI will grow 79 percent in 2016 as sales reach £1.38 billion. The analyst firm believes the tech industry is entering a ;third phase’ of integrated systems based on continuous application and microservices delivery.

Quiz: What do you know about cloud in 2016?