India is among the fastest growing markets for hybrid multi-cloud firm Nutanix and will remain a development hub for the firm, said Rajiv Ramaswami, its chief executive officer.

“India’s annual contract value grew 56% year-on-year in Q1FY23, while Nutanix’s global ACV grew 27%,” said Ramaswami, who is in India for the first time after being appointed the CEO of California-based Nutanix two years ago.

As per IDC, Nutanix had a market share of 52% at the end of the second quarter of calendar year 2022.

Nutanix’s R&D centres in Bengaluru and Pune are an integral part of the innovation strategy for the $1.58 billion firm, with 40% of the patents filed globally coming from the centres in India, he said.
Two years ago, the company had started to shift customers to a subscription-led model, which has made it easier for them to continue to invest in their digitisation initiatives even as macro-economic factors start slowing down.

“The cloud discussion has gotten a bit more nuanced over the last few years. People still want to go digital and build apps, but they are realising that where they are going to run these apps will vary,” said Ramaswami. “It’s not that everything is going to be the public cloud or everything is going to be in an on-prem data centre. They’re going to pick and choose and they’re going to choose that carefully.”

Ramaswami expects the increased need for data sovereignty and localisation to drive demand, for which he said Nutanix will work with local service providers. The company already has partnerships with local service providers and telcos, and Ramaswami said the company will work to strengthen them.

Nutanix has historically been an HCI company, and as it transitioned to being a hybrid multi-cloud provider, Ramaswami said India was at the vanguard of use cases around that transition. “We have banks in India that have moved very aggressively to the public cloud with us,” he said. RBL, an existing Nutanix customer, went ahead with testing and implementing its public cloud for disaster recovery within a matter of weeks, he said.

“Today we have a full stack–from computer virtualisation, software defined storage to networking, cloud management, unified storage and database as a service. In India, there’s a pretty good adoption of the full stack,” he said.

Ramaswami said he expects broader adoption of the portfolio across customers and a more widespread adoption of the public cloud. “We are also working on leveraging our partners and have made a number of strategic partnership announcements over the last year,” he said.

While the company will continue to monitor the broader macro-economic conditions globally, Ramaswami said customers are still investing in their digitisation projects and that Nutanix will continue to hire in India.

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