Nutanix CEO On Its R&D Vs. VMware: We Aren’t ‘Milking Legacy Products’
“We are not in the business of just milking legacy products. We are investing for the future,” said Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami.
Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami didn’t hold back when asked about the difference between his company’s and VMware’s R&D innovation strategy.
“At a fundamental level, we are investing for growth,” he said during an onstage interview at CRN’s 2026 XChange Best of Breed conference this week in Atlanta. “We are not in the business of just milking legacy products. We are investing for the future.”
“Our R&D spend is around 22 percent [to] 23 percent of our revenues, which is very high by the industry standards,” said Ramaswami.
Ramaswami said this means that businesses can look at Nutanix as their cluster platform partner for the next decade.
“Because when a customer makes a decision to run mission-critical applications on a platform like ours, they’re not thinking short-term. This is a platform that they want to invest in. They want to make sure that we are there with them and taking them into the future. That’s what we do with the R&D investment,” said Ramaswami.
He said the “vast majority of customers” want to exit VMware.
“Very few customers are saying, ‘I want to stay with VMware long-term,” Ramaswami said. “And nobody is looking at VMware as their long-term partner of choice.”
VMware declined to comment on the matter.
Nutanix And VMware R&D Numbers
Nutanix spent $205 million in research and development during its most recent fourth fiscal quarter 2026, with total revenue of $757 million, according to its Q4 2026 earnings report.
This means Nutanix R&D represented approximately 27 percent of revenue.
VMware owner Broadcom spent $2.89 billion on research and development in its most recent third fiscal quarter 2026, with total revenue of $29.6 billion, according to its Q3 2026 earnings report.
This means Broadcom’s R&D represented approximately 10 percent of total revenue.
Broadcom does not separate out its R&D for VMware, which is part of Broadcom’s infrastructure software group.
New VMware And Nutanix Innovation
In terms of new innovation, both competitors have launched a slew of new offerings in 2026.
Just this week, VMware launched HyperArmor, a new software solution to help further protect VMware’s ESX hypervisor component of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). HyperArmor aims to protect VCF customers against the increase in cyberattack sophistication by closing exposure windows without disrupting the workloads that depend on the host.
At VMware Explore last month, the company launched a new VMware AI Factory for VCF and added new AI model validations from Google, Nvidia and others for VCF.
Additionally, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company created three new VMware Private AI services to help make AI operational, governable and cost-effective.
Nutanix, for its part, recently launched a new Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for the Nutanix Cloud Platform, enabling customers to safely use AI tools to automate their daily cloud operations. The company also introduced the Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI) version 2.8 that provides centralized control for AI inference and agentic AI.
Last month, Nutanix also acquired orchestration and management platform company Ryax Technologies.
“We are taking [Ryax’s] technology and integrating it into our Kubernetes platform. All AI applications are on Kubernetes,” Ramaswami said. “What we want to do is make sure our Kubernetes platform optimizes and gets the most out of the GPU investments that people make. ... So by integrating the Ryax technology inside, we can now actually place workloads much more efficiently onto those GPUs and get the most out of those GPUs. So that’s what this investment is about.”
Broadcom Driving More Innovation Than Ever At VMware: VCF Says
In an interview last year with CRN, VMware’s VCF head, Krish Prasad, said Broadcom is driving innovation faster than ever at VMware.
“When Broadcom acquired VMware, the talk was, ‘Oh, VMware is dead. Innovation is dead. Nothing will come out.’ And in fact, more innovation came out faster after VMware was acquired than VMware ever produced in the past,” said Prasad, senior vice president and general manager of Broadcom’s VCF Division.
Prasad explained that Broadcom’s decision to consolidate hundreds of VMware point products into the VCF platform, as well as combining internally siloed organizations and divisions together, helped streamline innovation that included the launch of VCF 9.
“Customers were complaining all the time, ‘Why aren’t we delivering a platform?’ And we never could because of the structure. The first thing that [Broadcom CEO] Hock Tan did during the integration of the acquisition was to fix that,” Prasad said. “We now have one division, which is the VCF division, where we brought all the pieces. So one R&D team saying, ‘Let’s go build.’ … Hock has shown us that he is willing to invest.”
A top executive from a global solution provider that is both a VMware reseller and a Nutanix partner said he believes both companies are investing enough in R&D.
“It’s hard to say one of them is out-innovating the other at this point,” said the executive, who declined to be identified.
“Broadcom wants to push customers to VCF, or VVF [VMware vSphere Foundation]. So that’s where they’re putting their R&D dollars, to keep people wanting that platform. Broadcom is a very big company compared to Nutanix with more resources. So Nutanix is selling different product types so a wider set of R&D initiatives. Their goal is to really win over VMware customers who don’t want the full VMware stack, which can obviously be pricey compared to single products,” he said.
Overall, the executive, who has partnered with both VMware and Nutanix for years, said it’s hard to compare R&D spending between the two companies.
“Honestly, they both are innovating. That’s why we’re still partners with both,” he said.
VMware And Nutanix Earnings
VMware is part of Broadcom’s infrastructure software group. This group generated a total of $8.75 billion in revenue during its third fiscal quarter 2026.
This represents a 29 percent growth rate year over year compared to $6.78 billion.
Nutanix generated $757 million in total revenue during Q4 2026, representing a 16 percent growth rate year over year.
In Q4, Nutanix annual recurring revenue was $2.55 billion, also up 16 percent year over year.