Nutanix’s New CEO Unveils His Top 4 Priorities

Nutanix’s new CEO Rajiv Ramaswami unveils his top four priorities as the company reports $346 million in total revenue during its second quarter earnings report on Wednesday.

After getting his feet wet as Nutanix’s new CEO, Rajiv Ramaswami outlined his top four priorities to take the hyperconverged and hybrid cloud software star to the next level.

“All these priorities are part of the natural evolution of a company at scale,” said Ramaswami during the company’s second fiscal quarter financial earnings call with media and analysts on Wednesday.

Two of Ramaswami’s top priorities are product portfolio simplification as well as more channel partner investment and engagement.

As Nutanix’s CEO, partners will become an ever more “critical component of ensuring that we have the leverage needed to grow and scale our business through our subscription transformation,” said Ramaswami, who took the helm of Nutanix in December. “We will focus on deepening our partnerships to provide more impact in how we go to market as well as create more opportunities within larger accounts.”

[Related: Why Nutanix Is ‘Superior’ To VMware: Partners]

In a move to better enable the channel and leverage partners to increase Nutanix’s market reach and scale, the company launched its new Elevate Partner Program.

“Last quarter, we launched our Elevate Partner Program which focuses on partner competencies through training to increase the quality of partners working with us, and partner enablement, including improving the deal registration process to increase volume,” Ramaswami said. “With this focus, we have seen a 12 percent year over year expansion in the number of partners who transacted with us during the quarter, as well as an increase in partner-led deals.”

Regarding his product portfolio simplification priority, the CEO said although many customers love the simplicity and innovation of Nutanix products, some express a need for easier end-to-end adoption.

“Some [customers] expressed that they would like us to make it easier for them to adopt and consume our software by delivering more solutions that bring our portfolio together and to simplify our pricing and packaging. We have built the feedback into our key priorities for our go-to-market strategy,” said Ramaswami. “We will drive more simplification of our portfolio and how we take our solutions to market, including our products and packaging, for the benefit of our customers.”

Ramaswami’s final two key priorities include continuing Nutanix’s transformation to a subscription business model with a large focus on renewals, as well as growing and nurturing the company’s employee talent pool.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company reported its second fiscal quarter financial results, which ended Jan. 31, 2021, on Wednesday.

Nutanix generated a total of $346 million in revenue during its second quarter, representing flat year over year sales growth.

The company generated $159 million in annual contact value (ACV) billings, up 14 percent year over year. Nutanix’s ACV run rate now stands at $1.38 billion.

“We delivered record ACV billings with growth of 14 percent year-over-year, bolstered by the strength of our emerging products,” said Nutanix CFO Duston Williams. “We continued to make progress on our transition to subscription and maintained our disciplined approach to managing operating expenses, which were lower than expected this quarter.“

Nutanix’s year over year operating expenses dropped from nearly $400 million to $354 million in second quarter 2021.

Nutanix added 730 new customers in its second quarter, bringing the total number of customers to 18,770. Nutanix customers now include about 950 of the Global 2000 companies.

Nutanix stock climbed 3 percent in after-hours trading to $34.72 per share.