Nutanix CEO: Broad Vendor Ecosystem Opens Opportunities For Channel Partners

‘We’ve got HCI, but today we work with all forms of external storage in a much broader cloud platform. We work with Dell storage. We [will be working] with NetApp. We work with Everpure. And what’s important about this is that there’s massive amounts of infrastructure deployed out there that can all be modernized with Nutanix software without requiring any hardware updates,’ says Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami.

Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami sees the company’s broadening ecosystem of storage, cloud and server partners as central to expanding its total addressable market and the opportunities available to channel partners.

Ramaswami Tuesday told an audience of solution providers at this week’s 2026 XChange Best of Breed Conference in Atlanta that Nutanix remains rooted in hyperconverged infrastructure.

However, he said Nutanix’s software now runs with external storage from Dell and Everpure and will be running on external storage from NetApp; on bare metal in Amazon, Microsoft Azure and Google public clouds; and across a wide range of server platforms. That flexibility lets customers modernize existing environments without automatically replacing hardware.

“We’ve got HCI, but today we work with all forms of external storage in a much broader cloud platform,” he said. “We work with Dell storage. We [will be working] with NetApp. We work with Everpure. And what’s important about this is that there’s massive amounts of infrastructure deployed out there that can all be modernized with Nutanix software without requiring any hardware updates.”

The XChange Best of Breed Conference is hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company.

That storage support changes the market equation, Ramaswami said. HCI represents about 20 percent of existing infrastructure, while external storage accounts for the other 80 percent. Instead of first persuading customers to convert those environments to HCI, Nutanix and its partners can bring the company’s software directly to the infrastructure already in place, he said.

“So right there, we’ve expanded our TAM [total addressable market] dramatically to be able to now play inside 80 percent of the market,” he said. “In the past, we had to work very hard to convert those over to HCI. Now we don’t. Now we can just go in there and drop in and replace legacy [system software] with Nutanix.”

Ramaswami said the TAM expands further with modern, containerized applications and AI. Nutanix offers a Kubernetes platform alongside support for traditional virtual machine applications, giving customers common tools and the ability to mix legacy and modern workloads. Its AI platform also addresses agentic applications, access to intelligence, token-cost management and GPU clusters, he said.

“Now above that is modern applications as people are deploying Kubernetes-based containerized applications,” he said. “That’s our new TAM. Tens of billions of dollars there. And then on top of that, I really don’t even know how big this AI TAM is going to be. We are in the early stages.”

For channel partners, much of the near-term greenfield opportunity sits inside the large installed bases of Dell, NetApp and Everpure, Ramaswami said. Customers can reuse servers and storage, deploy Nutanix software and perform in-place migrations. Ramaswami said data can remain where it is while customers replace their virtualization software, reducing disruption and helping ease adoption of Nutanix.

“With Dell PowerStore, Dell PowerFlex and Everpure, we are seeing a ton of opportunity there because these are all existing environments that customers have, and they are very comfortable with how they work,” he said. “And now they can reuse their servers and their storage and deploy an intelligent software. And the migration can be done in place.”

The current hardware price increases, where memory and GPU shortages have caused server prices to spike by three to five times this year, make that flexibility more important, Ramaswami said. With these constraints, partners should help customers modernize existing hardware where possible, sell software and services around those projects, and widen their search across server manufacturers when purchases are necessary, he said.

“Very often people say, ‘OK, I’ve got my two server vendors, and let me go purchase from them,’” he said. “I think that has changed now completely. You’ve got to look at everybody out there. Look at who’s got supply available, who’s got the best price, and what I see is quite a range of differences.”

Public cloud gives partners another route. Ramaswami said Nutanix can run on bare metal in the major public clouds, allowing partners to move customers from on-premises VMware environments to Nutanix in the cloud as seamlessly as an on-premises migration. He framed the playbook as modernizing in place, considering the broadest possible set of server vendors and embracing public cloud.

“This is a time in the industry where public clouds may actually be more easily available than waiting for an on-prem server to be delivered,” he said. “And internet software runs through public clouds. And in fact, we’ve recently seen more customers turn into the public cloud as they do some of these migrations.”

Ramaswami said the ecosystem gives channel partners a foundational platform that works with the major vendors they already sell. That, he said, lets partners build solutions around customers’ current technologies rather than forcing a single hardware path, while creating mutual sales opportunities with larger providers.

“You work with Microsoft, Amazon, Google,” he said. “You work with all the major hardware providers. And now you have the ability to really look at Nutanix as a foundational platform that can actually work with every one of these major players in the industry and create a [winning] situation for customers depending on what they have.”

Patrick Shelley, CTO at PKA Technologies, a Suffern, N.Y.-based solution provider, said Ramaswami has a really good handle on the market, what customers are doing and what their hiccups are.

Now with Nutanix’s existing Dell and Everpure relationships and the upcoming partnership with NetApp, the economics of a hardware refresh change, Shelley said.

“The biggest holdback from people is that whole hardware refresh, and especially with hardware prices now,” he said. “That’s a limiting factor. So the flexibility Nutanix provides to work with the big vendors accounts for a good chunk of the market that people are using. Ramaswami thought through that stuff.”

Ramaswami also made a good case for running Nutanix on the hyperscale clouds as well, Shelley said.

“Every environment is different, but it provides flexibility,” he said. “It’s giving people the flexibility of running where they want to, or even a combination of things. We have had customers that decided they’re going to keep a little bit here and a little bit there. You need to have that flexibility, which is what [Ramaswami] built out.”

Enterprise customers merge and make acquisitions and over the years and end up with a hodgepodge of technologies, and Nutanix with its focus on working with a range of on-premises and cloud technology providers helps modernize the infrastructure, said Mark Galyardt, president of XX, a holding company that includes Atlanta-based solution provider XIOSSX.

“There’s not a formula that says you’ve got to go clean all this up and standardize,” Galyardt told CRN. “It doesn’t happen. So I think what Nutanix is doing opens opportunities as more companies embrace integration with whatever a customer already has. I see that as a huge positive. It should benefit customers by providing more, not less, innovation.”