Nutanix Turns Up The Heat On AI, Hybrid Cloud And Partner-Led Growth

Nutanix is leaning into AI, hybrid cloud, and partner-led growth as customer demand accelerates, and businesses are turning to Nutanix to modernize IT, deploy AI applications and adopt hybrid cloud models with help from channel partners selling its full portfolio, driving net-new logos, and leading opportunities, CEO Rajiv Ramaswami says.

Hybrid multi-cloud computing and hyperconverged infrastructure technology developer Nutanix is enjoying the fruits of customer moves to modernize their IT infrastructure and take advantage of the cloud, the company’s CEO Rajiv Ramaswami told analysts.

Ramaswami, speaking during his prepared remarks to financial analysts on Nutanix’s third fiscal quarter 2026 financial analyst conference call, said his company continues to see healthy demand for its solutions as reflected in its strong bookings and outperformance versus guided metrics.

“We see this demand driven by businesses looking to modernize their IT footprints, adopt hybrid cloud operating models, and deploy cloud native applications, including AI,” he said.

During the quarter, Nutanix added over 700 new customers, Ramaswami said.

Despite the successes Nutanix saw during the quarter, the macro environment remains dynamic, Ramaswami said.

“Supply chain challenges continue to drive higher prices and generally longer lead times for server hardware from our partners, which are pressuring customer budgets and timelines,” he said. “However, Nutanix’s focus on customer choice helps mitigate some of this impact and enables customers to better manage their deployment timelines and budgets. These include choice of server vendors, choice of running in the public cloud on Nutanix Cloud Clusters or NC2, and in particular the choice of adopting our cloud platform with a growing number of external storage options.”

Ramaswami said the majority of current data center infrastructure is based on external storage and legacy hypervisors on servers.

“Our support of external storage platforms is simplifying migrations to Nutanix from these environments without requiring significant hardware changes. … We’re pleased with the progress we’ve seen today with our offerings supporting external storage, and expect continued growth as additional solutions become available over the course of the year,” he said.

Nutanix in the third quarter saw increased uptake of the public cloud deployment option for its NC2 platform, Ramaswami said.

“This included a notable quarter-over-quarter increase in both customer wins and cores deployed,” he said. “NC2 wins included a Fortune 500 financial services provider that was looking to expand its use of our cloud platform as they migrated away from their existing on-premises provider, facing longer lead times and higher prices for servers. This customer chose to deploy NC2 on AWS.”

When asked by an analyst about supply chain issues, Ramaswami said that customers are much more aware of the situation and how to navigate it.

“We are also helping them with that,” he said. “If you look at the last couple of months, we have seen hardware prices from server vendors out there continue to increase, but lead times are normalizing at some of the vendors, but remaining extended at others. We do expect hardware prices to remain elevated.”

Customers are looking for flexibility on software licensing terms, Ramaswami said.

“There are some instances of customers delaying projects, but those are not very common, but that does happen once in a while. … We have a number of tools to help them offset these issues, and they are actually also making use of this. They have a choice of several vendors. We have external storage platforms now available where they can do migrations without requiring new hardware purchases. They can use our solutions in the public cloud, and we’ve seen some customers do that directly, where [cloud-based] servers are more easily available and sometimes cheaper than buying enterprise servers. So, our customers are certainly getting used to this.”

Nutanix And The Channel

When asked in a post-conference call by CRN about Nutanix and its channel partners, Ramaswami said his company has been adding a number of channel partners over the last few years.

“By the way, everything we do is transacted through the channel,” he said. “That hasn’t changed. We have been recruiting a number of new channel partners over the last few years thanks to some of the externals from Broadcom. We have provided always, and continue to provide, incentive for channel partners to do more when they get us new logos. For example, the channel has been quite successful in terms of helping us get new logos, and we do provide incentive for channel partners to get us new logos.”

Nutanix also wants the channel to do even more, Ramaswami said.

“Sell our full portfolio, get trained in terms of some of our modern offerings, the Kubernetes offerings, the AI offerings, be able to transact [and] not just be a fulfillment vehicle for us, but also be able to go identify the opportunities, prosecute the opportunities more and more so that we can truly get the leverage we are looking for from the channel,” he said.

Nutanix has received a lot of attention from the marketplace over the last couple of years because it markets itself as a viable alternative to Broadcom’s VMware and vendor lock-in with VMware, said Ned Engelke, chief technology officer at Evotek, a San Diego-based solution provider and Nutanix channel partner.

“We’ve sold a lot of Nutanix because the company either has incumbency in accounts that want to expand their relationship, or they’ve been able to enter new accounts,” Engelke told CRN.

Nutanix is a good, responsible, reliable vendor, one that is easy to engage with, Engelke said.

“They seem to make happy customers, and they seem to be able to retain them,” he said. “The idea of Nutanix as a VMware replacement has been something they’ve been marketing around, and it seems like it’s resonating with customers.”

Nutanix By The Numbers

For its third fiscal quarter 2026, which ended April 30, Nutanix reported total revenue of $703.1 million, up about 10 percent over the $639.0 million the company reported for its third fiscal quarter 2025.

That included subscription revenue of $664.8 million, up from $609.7 million, and professional services and other revenue of $38.3 million, up from $29.3 million.

Nutanix also reported annual recurring revenue in the quarter of $2.43 billion, up about 15 percent from the $2.12 billion it reported last year. Average contract duration rose by 0.3 years to reach 3.4 years.

Total revenue beat analyst expectations by $16.7 million, according to Seeking Alpha.

Nutanix also reported GAAP net income for the quarter of $72.1 million or 25 cents per share, up from last year’s $63.4 million or 22 cents per share. On a non-GAAP basis, the company reported net income of $136.2 million or 47 cents per share, up from last year’s $124.7 million or 42 cents per share.

Non-GAAP earnings beat analyst expectations by 12 cents per share, according to Seeking Alpha.