Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami: The ‘Surge’ Is On

Rajiv Ramaswami has put all the pieces in place for what he calls a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ opportunity to win over new customers looking to migrate away from VMware. With investments in incentives, rebates and a new Surge Partner Program, the CEO is seizing the moment.

Solution provider executive Marco Mohajer last year received a frantic call from a financial services customer who had just learned its new VMware renewal price tag was going to skyrocket by 400 percent.

“They obviously had not budgeted money for [that large of a] price increase, so they were immediately put into a big quandary,” said Mohajer, president of Technologent. “They said, ‘We can’t afford it. What can we do?’”

The solution provider then examined all of the financial firm’s virtual machines (VMs) and carefully designed a plan to migrate thousands of them from VMware to the Nutanix platform.

Although the migration project took Technologent roughly one year to complete, the financial and technological benefits for the now-new Nutanix customer are immense.

“In the end it’s about cost savings, user happiness and customer delight—all of that came to fruition,” said Mohajer. “When all the changes at VMware happened, unfortunately they left us in the cold,” he said, referencing some of the strategy shifts Broadcom made after it acquired VMware for $61 billion in November 2023, such as taking top customers direct and increasing prices.

“That created an opportunity for Nutanix to leverage the void and fill the gap that VMware had created,” Mohajer said.

Many similar successful cases of moving North America-based Fortune 1000 companies off Broadcom-VMware technology onto Nutanix’s stack led to Irvine, Calif.-based Technologent’s annual Nutanix sales surging 200 percent in 2024, with more revenue growth expected this year.

Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami has jumped on this unprecedented opportunity to gain market share by striving to win over VMware customers with a strong channel and a technology road map that is transforming Nutanix from a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) provider into a true platform company.

“What I love about Rajiv is he thinks big,” Mohajer said. “He throws a wide net into the ocean. Once you throw a big, wide net into the ocean, you can catch anything from a tiny, little minnow to a massive whale. And he’s caught a few whales already because of his big thinking.”

Under Ramaswami’s leadership, Nutanix has added more than 600 new customers nearly every quarter since Broadcom’s VMware acquisition, including Toshiba and Wells Fargo.

The San Jose, Calif.-based HCI pioneer has increased its customer base from 24,000 in fiscal year 2023 to now over 28,500 customers, with no signs of slowing down.

“We’ve evolved into a platform company that can be the de facto platform on top of which any customer can run their applications and manage their data anywhere,” said Ramaswami in a recent interview with CRN. “We’re opening up a bigger TAM [total addressable market] for partners to address. We all know there are many customers out there looking to migrate away from VMware. And now as we get into the container market and modern applications, that’s adding several billions of dollars on top of the TAM we already have.”

Ramaswami said one thing is crystal clear: For Nutanix to become as ubiquitous as VMware, channel partners need to be the tip of the spear, a deep contrast compared with Broadcom’s channel strategy for VMware.

“We have a very different partner mindset compared to Broadcom. We are in it for the long haul with partners,” said Ramaswami, who is both a former top VMware and Broadcom executive. “We have a much more inclusive approach toward on-boarding partners to enable the broad channel to work for us. That’s a big advantage for us because we know if we do this effectively, this allows all of us to drive more leverage in the market and get a much broader global footprint.”

Broadcom declined to comment for this story.

Ramaswami’s Channel Charge

Ramaswami is putting his money where his mouth is when it comes to investing in profit-driving channel programs. He has developed a slew of tailor-made incentives, partner programs and stackable channel rebates all focused on winning new customers.

Nutanix’s channel push comes during what Ramaswami calls a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity as countless VMware customers take a serious look at their future as Broadcom customers after the company abandoned all VMware point products and mandated that they buy larger and pricier VMware Cloud Foundation bundles.

“A lot of VMware customers are looking for a new [technology] partner, a new provider that they can work with for the next 10 years. We’ve significantly expanded and refined our channel incentive programs for this moment,” said Ramaswami.

For its partner community, Nutanix created a new incentive targeting Broadcom-VMware customer migrations, rolled out a new Outperformance rebate, improved its deal registration process and launched its Surge Partner Program, which provides partners with a list of roughly 20,000 named accounts to attack with stackable rebates available. The company built an application for its Surge program that lets partners see which of the 20,000 accounts they’ve already done business with but do not have a Nutanix footprint yet.

“When Broadcom started coming out of the weeds on things like pricing changes, bundling, kicking out service providers—its fangs started to show,” said Nutanix global channel chief Dave Gwyn. “So we designed programs that are very oriented toward our partners making a profit on converting VMware customers.”

Ramaswami also led the effort to create a new “channel-led” rebate where partners “completely run” the sales efforts in entire market and geographic segments full of both prospects and existing customers, Gwyn said.

“We don’t have enough salespeople at Nutanix to cover the size of our universe, so there are certain segments that we just go, ‘Hey, that’s all completely channel-led.’ And if a partner does business in that channel-led segment, we pay another rebate,” said Gwyn, senior vice president of worldwide channels and customer success, who is also a former VMware executive.

“These accounts are by no means small accounts,” he added. “If we really believe in going to market through the channel, which we do, then we have to believe our channel can become autonomous and sell on our behalf and be force multipliers.”

Ramaswami Creates ‘Even Crisper’ Channel Strategy

For one of Nutanix’s largest European channel partners, NetNordic Group, these incentives and the overall channel go-to-market strategy helped boost its Nutanix annual sales by over 70 percent in 2024, with expectations to grow Nutanix revenue by 100 percent in 2025.

“There are levels in this channel game, and Nutanix is No. 1 in working with partners,” said Fredrik Rosman, managing director for NetNordic Sweden. “Since Rajiv came in, it’s an even crisper, clearer, structured partner strategy. He doesn’t allow deviations down in the organization. It goes from Rajiv all the way down to the local channel managers.”

One major highlight, Rosman said, was when Ramaswami revamped Nutanix’s deal registration process, effectively blocking fulfillment partners from coming in at the end of a sale to win with a less expensive price.

“They’re super strict with regards to making sure that the partner who does the work on the ground gets the best prices and the customer deal—that’s unique in today’s market for sure,” said Rosman. “Because in other cases, you have fulfillment partners coming in saying, ‘I can live on a 3 percent margin, and we’ll just come in and offer a lower price.’ That would kill partners like us that are self-sufficient who may work a year in the sales cycle. Nutanix prevents that.”

NetNordic has migrated former VMware customers—from several government municipalities to large medical companies—to Nutanix as customers feared rising VMware licensing costs and a lack of future VMware support. The innovation in Nutanix’s technology stack has now surpassed VMware’s, another major reason why NetNordic customers are switching, he said.

“When this medical company reviewed their new VMware licensing costs and faced an increase of 200 [percent] to 300 percent due to Broadcom’s recent changes in license packaging, their primary concern was to find an alternative solution that offered predictable licensing costs and a secure and integrated platform for a smooth transition,” Rosman said. “Regardless of licensing costs, I want to highlight that Nutanix is a superior, more flexible platform compared to VMware. It offers better integration and provides a more seamless user experience.”

Nutanix CEO: ‘Who Is Going To Innovate?’

Under Ramaswami’s leadership over the past five years, Nutanix’s portfolio has blossomed—from launching innovative migration tools like Move and new AI offerings to creating end-to-end integrated systems with infrastructure leaders including Dell Technologies, Nvidia and Pure Storage.

“Of course, the fact that VMware pricing is going up provides a trigger point, but the other vector is, ‘Who can you count on for the next five, 10 years to support your needs? Who is going to innovate?’ said Ramaswami. “That conversation is what leads all of these customers to Nutanix, and that’s why we’ve seen us adding north of 600-plus customers every quarter now.”

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) includes unified storage, data governance tools, hybrid cloud management, an integrated Database-as-a-Service platform, automated and secure networking products, and its AHV hypervisor for VMs and containers, to name a few.

To help partners even more with migrating businesses off VMware, Nutanix created Move, which many partners like Huntersville, N.C.-based XenTegra are constantly using.

After Broadcom discontinued VMware’s per-VM pricing offers, XenTegra leveraged Move and Nutanix’s NCI Edge package to save the day for one of its large retail customers.

“VMware wanted them to pay full per-core pricing as opposed to their old model of paying per VM, so it led to a huge price increase for them,” said Philip Sellers, who leads XenTegra’s Nutanix business as director of modern data centers. “So Nutanix offered them a very cost-effective way to continue to pay per VM and still get all the resiliency, innovation and enterprise-level services they need from their hosting platform.”

Sellers said many of XenTegra’s distribution and edge customers have adopted NCI Edge because they can pay on a per-VM basis.

“We’ve seen 5X bill increases [for our VMware customers] for some of these edge use cases because a virtual machine can be very compute-heavy. Some end up having to pay for all of those cores instead of paying for the virtual machine,” said Sellers. “We’ve seen a lot of customers embrace Nutanix for retail, for distribution centers and for medical offices.”

Nutanix revenue has tripled over the past three years for XenTegra as the solution provider has also increased its Nutanix managed services group head count by 50 percent.

Partners ‘Deliver the Bulk Of The Services’

XenTegra and other partners said they’re doubling down on their Nutanix business because Ramaswami is handing over nearly all of his company’s services business to channel partners.

Ramaswami said the fact that less than 10 percent of Nutanix’s total revenue comes from services is intentional.

“We are fundamentally a product company, and we very much rely on our partners to deliver the bulk of the services that our customers need,” said Nutanix’s CEO. “Beyond just reselling our product, they should be focused on delivering a set of services on top because that actually helps them establish more strategic positions within the accounts and, at the same time, make more money as well.”

From assessment and migration services to implementation and life-cycle management, the margin opportunity for Nutanix partners in 2025 is ripe.

The profit potential is so great that many partners have created their own services offerings around Nutanix, especially around Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).

Nutanix worked closely with XenTegra engineers to create XenTegra’s own DRaaS offering, which has increased DRaaS opportunities for the solution provider by 400 percent.

“We use the full stack, meaning not just the hypervisor and storage, but also its networking technology, [Nutanix] Flow, which allows us to seamlessly fail over from one coast to the other,” Sellers said.

With advanced failover orchestration, nondisruptive testing and end-to-end management, XenTegra’s DRaaS ensures applications and data are secure, accessible and fully recoverable.

“Nutanix understands that we are their scale,” said Sellers. “We go out and reach more people both from a sales and services perspective, and we’re touching the customer in more places than just their server infrastructure. … My team gets the same access as a Nutanix employee.”

Ramaswami said Nutanix is eager to work “hand-in-hand with our partners” to get all types of Nutanix service offerings launched in the marketplace. This co-innovation strategy isn’t just helping partners create new services, but completely new customer opportunities thanks to Ramaswami forming partnerships with IT market leaders.

Ramaswami Forges Blockbuster Alliances

This year, Nutanix established new partnerships in storage, cloud computing and AI with industry leaders Amazon Web Services, Cisco Systems, Citrix, Nvidia and Pure Storage, to name a few.

For example, the Pure Storage partnership allows customers to buy NCI integrated with Pure Storage FlashArray systems. In addition, Ramaswami was able to form deeper integrations between Nutanix’s Enterprise AI offering and Nvidia’s NIM microservices and NeMo framework.

Nutanix also has co-innovated with Dell to have its platform available on Dell PowerFlex systems, while Ramaswami boosted its cloud alliances so Nutanix offerings can now be available through the AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud online marketplaces.

“We are now letting partners go to more places, so if they walk into a customer that says, ‘We’re Google Cloud.’ They can now say, ‘OK, that works. Let’s talk.’ We couldn’t do that before,” said Nutanix’s Gwyn. “Or if a partner talked to a Pure customer who would say, ‘Sorry, Nutanix partner, I’ve got a three-year Pure deal that I just bought. Come back in three years,’ now, we can talk to them and say, ‘Hey, Pure customer, we’ve now got a better way for you to run. And we can migrate you off VMware ESX and you can still take advantage of your Pure flash array. … It’s not an ‘either/or’ situation anymore.”

One shining example of Ramaswami’s prowess in forming game-changing partnerships to elevate the channel came this year when Nutanix unveiled that Omnissa, formed in 2024 when VMware spun off its end-user computing business, now supports Nutanix AHV.

“Naturally, as a VMware spinoff, Omnissa was running on top of the VMware ESX hypervisor,” said Gwyn. “That’s what the big thrill is about this announcement, that Omnissa was looking at it and said, ‘Hey, maybe ESX isn’t the lone place to be running. Maybe we should be running on another hypervisor, specifically on AHV.’ … You would have never expected Nutanix to partner with someone like Omnissa or Pure—that would have been crazy talk three years ago. But now, it makes perfect sense because of market-condition changes from Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.”

According to a report by IT research firm Gartner, by 2028 approximately 30 percent of companies that were VMware customers in 2024 will transition from VMware’s vSphere hypervisor to an alternative hypervisor or adopt container platforms.

“Our TAM is increasing because we’re looking at containers and AI, while at the same time we’re able to sell much more now in our core TAM because of our breadth of portfolio,” said Ramaswami.

Partners: VMware ‘Won’t Budge On Price Increases’

Many partners CRN spoke with said Broadcom seems unperturbed by some VMware customers jumping ship to competitors.

“We have a lot of customers where, I don’t know for sure that VMware doesn’t want them, but they certainly seem like they’re not interested in those customers,” said XenTegra’s Sellers. “They won’t budge on price increases or options, so we’re able to do a complete Nutanix swap-out.”

NetNordic’s Rosman said many VMware customers are still unsure what their licensing costs will be when renewals come up, as well as how much support they’ll receive in the future.

“As soon as three- to five-year [VMware] contracts start to come to an end, more customers are going to start moving over to Nutanix at a higher pace. They’ll get a more flexible solution and better control of their licensing cost and administrative ease of use versus VMware. That’s something we’re going to see pick up,” said Rosman.

Ramaswami Sees A Bright Future

Ramaswami has driven growth for partners and for Nutanix. The company hit a quarterly high of $639 million in revenue during its third fiscal quarter of 2025, representing 22 percent growth year over year. It is projecting record annual sales of $2.53 billion for fiscal year 2025, which would be a 36 percent increase compared with $1.86 billion in fiscal year 2023.

“What Rajiv is doing with this platform, what he’s doing with the new partnerships and how he’s done an amazing job convincing a lot of people to jump on his bandwagon—he’s thinking massively,” said Technologent’s Mohajer. “His seat is not a comfortable seat to be in.

He’s got investors and an entire ecosystem that have put him on a pedestal to make this company go to the next level during a big market opportunity that is not handed to you every day. He’s done an amazing job of getting this business to where it is today. I really appreciate the fact that they stand behind us and next to us. He’s clearly got a believer in me.”

Interestingly, Ramaswami was VMware’s COO for products and cloud services before taking the helm at Nutanix in 2020. He also was general manager of Broadcom’s Infrastructure and Networking Group for years before he joined VMware in 2016.

“I loved my time at VMware. A great company, great team, great technology, great customer intimacy and so many companies around the world trusted VMware. It was a lot about innovation. We were always thinking about what we would be doing next. Now, of course, it’s a very different business model at this point,” said Ramaswami. “The focus is on just keeping some of your existing customers, not necessarily even all of them, but also trying to maximize the revenue that you can get from that customer base while trimming costs down. So it’s a very different model right now.”

For his part, Nutanix’s CEO is entrusting channel partners to take the company to the next level.

“We are in a unique position in the market. There are a lot of customers looking to migrate away [from VMware],” he said. “We will support our channel and stand behind partners, but we are not going to be in front at the account level. With this, our future looks brighter than ever.”