Report: Nutanix May Delay IPO

February 26, 2016, 02:58 PM EST

Leading hyper-converged infrastructure technology developer Nutanix may be delaying its planned IPO until financial market conditions improve, according to a new report from CNBC.

CNBC this week reported that the tech IPO market is on hold, with no tech companies going public in the past three months, and with share prices of seven of the last 10 tech companies to go public falling below their IPO price.

Nutanix in December filed it S-1, and had been widely expected to debut as a public company early this year. However, CNBC, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, reported that Nutanix is now following the advice of its bankers and waiting for the stock market volatility to dissipate.

One source familiar with the matter told CRN that Nutanix is delaying its IPO until at least the second quarter of 2016, possibly even the third quarter, so long as stock market valuations and liquidity improve.

[Related: Hyper-Converged Startup Nutanix Files For IPO, Had $241 Million In Revenue In 2015]

A Nutanix spokesperson told CRN via email that Nutanix is not commenting on its IPO.

Putting further pressure on Nutanix, as CRN first reported in January, Cisco Systems is preparing a new hyper-converged appliance that combines its UCS servers with technology gained from an OEM agreement with hyper-converged software startup Springpath, according to sources familiar with the vendor's plans. That hyper-converged appliance will debut next week at the Cisco Partner Summit in San Diego, sources told CRN.

The stock market has not been kind to companies similar to Nutanix that have recently gone through the IPO process.

The most recent, Pure Storage, the Mountain View, Calif.-based developer of all-flash storage arrays, on Oct. 8 saw its share prices debut at $16.04. Share prices quickly climbed to more than $19 that month, but have recently been in the $12 to $13-plus range.

Another example, San Jose, Calif.-based all-flash and hybrid flash array developer Nimble Storage, debuted as a public company Dec. 13, 2013, closing at $33.93. By February 2014, the company had reached $58 per share, but this month, slipped to as low as $5.73 before recovering to Friday's $7.75 shortly before the close of the trading day.

A delay in Nutanix's IPO is no cause for worry, said Jeff Guenthner, director for solutions architecture at CMI, a Mill Valley, Calif.-based solution provider and Nutanix channel partner. "Nutanix is financially solid," Guenthner told CRN.

Guenthner said he will be excited for Nutanix when it eventually does have its IPO. "I have a lot of good friends there," he said. "There's a lot of great people doing a lot of great things there. They deserve the reward of an IPO."

CMI has seen its Nutanix business grow like crazy, especially since the release of version 4.6 of Nutanix's Acropolis hypervisor, Guenthner said. "With Acropolis 4.6, we can convert a running virtual machine from VMware to Acropolis to save the licensing costs," he said. "That function is coming for Hyper-V as well. We can also now offer cross-hypervisor disaster recovery to and from Acropolis and VMware and Hyper-V."

Joseph F. Kovar

Joseph F. Kovar is a senior editor and reporter for the storage and the non-tech-focused channel beats for CRN. He keeps readers abreast of the latest issues related to such areas as data life-cycle, business continuity and disaster recovery, and data centers, along with related services and software, while highlighting some of the key trends that impact the IT channel overall. He can be reached at jkovar@thechannelcompany.com.