CEO Rajiv Ramaswami talks to CRN about potential tariff impacts, its new key partnership with VMware spin-off Omnissa, Nutanix boosting partner profitability, and much more.
CEO Rajiv Ramaswami is bullish about Nutanix’s future as the hyperconverged superstar forges new vendor alliances that open Nutanix’s total addressable market (TAM) for partners while also investing in channel margin opportunities aimed at winning over VMware-Broadcom customers.
“Nutanix has moved from a best of breed HCI provider to more of a cloud platform company with a broader ecosystem and a growing base of customers,” said Ramaswami in an interview with CRN. “This opens up a bigger TAM opportunity for all of us to address.”
Fresh off a successful Nutanix Next 2025 conference last week—which saw a record of more than 5,000 attendees, including 1,600 partners—Ramaswami said he has bold plans to win more market share with the channel leading the way.
“For us, services represent less than 10 percent of our revenue. We’re a product company. We’re not a services company. Nutanix’s entire services opportunity is open to channel partners,” said Nutanix CEO.
[Related: Nutanix Next CEO Keynote: 6 Big Remarks On Google, AWS, Cisco and Pure Storage]
New Nutanix Innovation
At Nutanix Next last week, the San Jose, Calif.-based company launched a slew of new innovation and partnerships around storage, cloud and AI with the likes of Nvidia, Pure Storage, Cisco and VMware spin-off company Omnissa.
“The two big players in end user computing are Citrix and Omnissa,” said Nutanix’s CEO. “While [Omnissa] was part of VMware, we had no opportunity for them to really support our hypervisor. So now, Omnissa opens a new door for us.”
Nutanix also unveiled a new Nutanix Enterprise AI iteration, a cloud native version of its AOS operating system, the integration of Nutanix HCI on Pure Storage, and a new joint FlashStack solution with Pure and Cisco.
In an interview with CRN, Ramaswami talks about Nutanix’s channel charge in 2025, his company becoming a platform provider, competition with VMware and if he expects tariffs to impact Nutanix’s business.
Do you think Nutanix will feel any effects from any potential tariffs?
Look, as a software company, we don’t have a direct impact from the tariffs. But there’s an indirect impact with our hardware providers.
The hardware providers, of course, are doing everything they can to mitigate the effects of tariffs. There’s a lot of uncertainty around where these tariffs could go and what could happen in the future. Everybody’s trying to navigate their way around it.
We are sort of a step removed from this.
But our hardware partners are very actively engaged in all of this.
Then there’s also a corner [of the market] talking about inflation, recession and all those things. These are things that we don’t control as a company. So we focus mostly on what we can control. Then when these things come up, we try to adapt as best as we can.
Just how important is your new partnership with Omnissa?
Omnissa used to be VMware before they got spun out of VMware into a separate standalone company that’s privately owned today.
The two big players in end user computing are Citrix and Omnissa. While [Omnissa] was part of VMware, we had no opportunity for them to really support our hypervisor. So now, Omnissa opens a new door for us.
The irony is Nutanix has always worked on VMware hypervisors, but Omnissa never supported our hypervisor while they were part of VMware.
But now that they’re an independent company, it makes sense for them. It opens a broader universe with them as well, because they have a lot of customers who are also using Nutanix hypervisor. So it’s a win-win for both of us to be able to come together.
Ultimately, we went because this customer who wanted Omnissa and wanted Nutanix. Now this joint certification now allows customers to do that.
How are you enabling partners to win over VMware-Broadcom customers?
We have a new customer incentive, another partner incentive called Nutanix Surge, and a channel-led strategy for a certain portion of our customer base, which is all up to the channel.
For channel-led, we’ve given it to the channel to say, ‘You folks, should be the lead. We will support you behind the scenes, but we’re not going to have our sellers directly in those segments.’ We’re going to relay on the channel to do it.
We both have to make money right?
The channel cares about profitability. We want to make sure we are having the right behavior, where our channel partners are getting rewarded even more if they bring in new customers to us, which is really why we have a new customer initiative for them.
Then when they actually go out there and are the front and leading the deal, then of course, we give you more. But at the end of the day, profitability is something that we have a variety of ways of addressing.
We want to make sure we are most competitive out there with respect to enabling channel partners to be profitable as they sell Nutanix.
What should channel partners be doubling down on right now? How is Nutanix evolving for partners?
There’s a significant services opportunity for partners to address beyond just the resell.
There’s consulting opportunities. There’s migration services. There’s ongoing services, and that should be a very key focus.
Because our footprint is small as a company. Whether it’s our sellers or our own services, partner opportunities are big on both. We get leverage through the partner sales and then the partner services.
For us, services represent less than 10 percent of our revenue. We’re a product company. We’re not a services company. Nutanix’s entire services opportunity is open to channel partners.
[In terms of evolving] Nutanix is becoming a platform company with a broader and broader ecosystem around it. We’re broadening our reach. We’re broadening our use cases. This opens up a bigger TAM opportunity for all of us to address.
We go to market through partners. So I’m inviting our partners to really focus on addressing the broader opportunities that we’ve unlocked, whether it’s in our core infrastructure—now with expanded partnerships with some of our ecosystem partners—or moving forward into the future with things like cloud native applications and early stages of generative AI.
Why are customers seeking out Nutanix partners so much in 2025? What’s your message to the channel?
Our technology has an addressable market of well over 100,000 to 200,000 customers out there.
Technology keeps evolving and it’s pretty complex, so it’s hard for the end customer to keep up. Then many of these end customers have very few people on their staff who have to manage significant size environments. So there’s a very heavy reliance on partners.
If you’re a smaller company, you’re relying entirely on partners for implementation, migration services, consulting, etc. So the partners play a very, very important role in helping those customers be successful.
If you’re a large Fortune 100 company, you probably have big IT staff. But you also have a lot of complexity to navigate. You need a lot more services to help navigate the complexity of your environment. So there again, the partners play a very important role.
This tech ecosystem continues to evolve, continues to be complex—the end customers can’t keep up with all of this. The partner community, therefore, has a very important role in being on top of what’s changing, being able to rapidly adapt and help customers achieve success.
Ultimately, it’s not just about selling, right? It’s really about making those customers successful because that’s when you get repeat sales. And that’s when you get expansion.
We have an opportunity for the partner community to jump in deeper with us, and together, let’s go win.
