Nutanix Adds ‘Technology Visionary’—Former VMware Exec And Intel CTO—To Board

Former Intel Executive Vice President and CTO Greg Lavender left his role at the chipmaker in June. On Thursday, he was named to Nutanix’s board of directors.

Nutanix has added engineering heavyweight Greg Lavender—a veteran of some of the largest technology vendors—to its board of directors.

Lavender has designed hardware and software products for Intel, VMware, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems and Citi. He also serves on the board of Arista Networks.

In a statement, Nutanix President and CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said Lavender can help the company achieve its vision of becoming the de facto platform for running applications and AI and managing data anywhere.

“Greg has a deep engineering background with experience from both the vendor and customer perspective,” Ramaswami said. “He is a technology visionary who has a strategic understanding of the tech stack, generative AI and other modern, cloud native-based applications, as well as a practical knowledge of how to best serve customers. He will undoubtedly prove invaluable as a member of our board.”

Lavender most recently worked as CTO of Intel, where he was hand-picked by former CEO Pat Gelsinger to lead the chip giant’s Software & Advanced Technology Group, Intel Labs, Intel Tiber AI Cloud, Intel IT and Information Security.

Nutanix told CRN it had no comment beyond what was already stated.

Lavender has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in computer networking and distributed computing from Virginia Tech. In addition to his corporate roles, he was a research scientist at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp.—a public-private research and development facility—for 14 years.

At VMware he shaped the virtualization giant’s multi-cloud and modern application strategy, Nutanix’s press release stated.

“Nutanix is at the forefront of enterprise technology innovation,” Lavender said in a statement. “They predicted that companies would be using multiple clouds and multiple locations to run their applications and data and have built a software stack that is built to accommodate this future. I am looking forward to working with Rajiv [Ramaswami], the executive team, and the rest of the Board in helping Nutanix serve its customers while helping to accelerate their growth.”

Nutanix has been gaining ground on archrival VMware in recent years following the virtualization giant’s acquisition by Broadcom. Nutanix’s annual sales leaped 18 percent last year as the company added 2,700 new customers to its platform—including large enterprise accounts that have tens of thousands of compute cores—with Nutanix’s channel flipping more of its VMware customers to the hyperconverged infrastructure platform.

For the fiscal year ended July 31, Nutanix’s revenue reached $2.54 billion. The company’s net income of $39 million was up from a net loss of $108 million in the year prior.

For the fourth quarter, Nutanix’s revenue increased 19 percent to $653.2 million. Net income for the quarter was $13.9 million. For the first quarter, Nutanix expects revenue to come in between $670 million and $680 million, and it expects sales in the next full fiscal year to land between $2.90 billion and $2.94 billion.