A followup to the earlier thread about possible performance issues with Nutanix, despite happy customers.
https://virtualizationreview.com/blogs/mental-ward/2015/08/n…
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I read it. Hard to come to a reasonable conclusion. Nutanix is wary of outside test organizations executing and publishing performance reviews. How do I plug that into an investment thesis? I don’t really know.
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A followup to the earlier thread about possible performance issues with Nutanix, despite happy customers.
Performance issues? Let’s see:
VMWare’s revenue was up 11% last quarter.
Nutanix’s revenue was up 46% last quarter, even after they eliminated 8% of their pass-through hardware revenue, which they counted the year before.
Which do you think had happier customers?
Even that critical article you linked to acknowledged that while Nutanix wouldn’t let that particular rating service rate its product, 100% of the “numerous” Nutanix users who wrote in on the thread were happy with the product. Apparently they didn’t even harvest one complainer, which is quite remarkable in itself. Here’s the direct quote:
It’s also important to point out that numerous Nutanix customers responded on the same forum thread, and they were uniformly happy with their Nutanix experience.
I think this is probably a phony issue, pushed by VMWare in desperation, to try to discredit Nutanix. Just my guess.
Saul
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To be sure, happy customers and increasing sales are good things we like to see. My reason for raising these issues is just to raise a flag to a possible future issue. Many products like this are bought by high level corporate types which get sold a message by the sales reps. The message is partly true, but partly not and the latter is not openly admitted. This raises the possibility that at some future point it will turn out that the hidden part becomes important, e.g., the slow restore resulting in a protracted time off line in a 24x365 business which I described earlier. This has the potential for turning a happy customer into an unhappy one. It is just a caution.
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The article was from 2 1/2 years ago…would it be possible for you to post something more timely?
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WOW! I missed the date of the article entirely, Had I noticed, I wouldn’t have even read it. Two and a half years is almost eternity in the high-tech IT world.
Performance testing is one thing, but value of the whole product is something else.
As an example, there is absolutely no doubt that Samsung and HTC and Google make better phones, with betters specs, better cameras, better features, and at better prices. Absolutely no doubt whatsoever!
Yet, Apple dominates. And Apple products always have issues with it when they first roll out. The biggest one is that the trade journals will say “there are no applications taking advantage of it”. So friggin what! We know they will come. We know Apple will also fix any bug in their systems. They always have and always will. “Bendgate”.
Thus, one needs to dig further as why this is, if Apple is selling a more expensive product for what you get. The answer is of course that Apple software is better, and it is not only better, but also better aligned to maximize the hardware, and to work with the entire eco-system.
Ergo, I don’t even care about these sort of tests anymore comparing Apple to its competition. I know Apple will product a good enough product, and its software and ecosystem is so much better it does not matter unless the Samsung phone were to enable me to shoot deadly lasers out of it, or to give me the power of flight or teleportation.
Nutanix has extreme client satisfaction. This client satisfaction can be manufactured as well, so you cannot take it on face value either.
However, when looking at things holistically, you can discount the lack of benchmarking because it passes the real world test.
Also, growth rates are misleading. VMWare is growing much slower than NTNX. However, that is not necessarily the case in each segment. VMWare’s primary business is legacy virtual machine, and not hyper convergence. The real comparison is apples to apples. I believe Duma has some numbers on this more apple to apple comparison.
In the end, the market is a duopoly, but subject to disruptions, particularly as AI becomes a greater portion of a what a data center will do (as AI is different from what we are use to, and look what happened with ANET and Cisco from traditional data center to the cloud centric data center. Now we also have an AI centric data center…will this produce a new disruption and new leader?).
Never take ay article on its face. It may be completely true in what it says but completely irrelevant to the real world. It is just one piece of the puzzle.
And it is quite clear, by having more than 8,0000 enterprise customers that Nutanix’s data center products work very well. If they were too slow, VMWare would be eating them for lunch. Customers would not be satisfied.
What is also clear is that Nutanix software is not being utilized throughout the entire data center as of yet, but only segments of it. Why this is, I don’t know. It may live room for much more growth, or it may point to current limitations. Worth digging into.
It is this sort of uncertainty and conventional wisdom that creates investing opportunity. It is all part of the FUD landscape that one as an investor has to love and look for and then intelligently see trough it all, when there is something to be seen through.
Tinker
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make better phones, with betters specs, better cameras, better features, and at better prices. Absolutely no doubt whatsoever!
Not as sure as you but for me the killer point is IOS. Way better than Android even if the latter is getting better. And resale value. Put in car terms one depreciates rapidly the other doesn’t. And longer lasting, especially when it comes to laptops. Older MacBooks just keep chugging long, and do it without viruses.
I don’t even care about these sort of tests anymore comparing Apple to its competition me too, especially with computers. I despise Windows.
I still use my PC for most things rather than phones or tablets. In fact about all I use my tablets for is reading books and Android is OK for Kindle books.
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Tinker,
Love your reference to the FUD landscape.
Other than overt propaganda, FUD used to be primarily the product of what we didn’t know, lack of information. Now, the tables have turned. FUD seems to come from information overload, there’s so much information available about virtually any subject we always have the feeling that there’s more to know and what information can I trust? Your point about “holistic” perspective is spot on, but when do you feel you’ve achieved it? When does one more data point complete the picture?
That’s why I commented had I noticed the date on the article, I wouldn’t have taken the time to read it. Information about technology tends to get stale very fast.