Further, outside of VMWare and Nutanix, the next best place marketshare is Cisco at 5%, HPE at 4.5%.
Has anyone actually used NTNX software? Is it much better than VMWare, CSCO, HPE? What I am getting at is if the product is a commodity can the marketshare erode quickly?
In your 30-second elevator pitch the only thing I couldn’t understand at all was:
“support virtualized environment deployment.”
Unfortunately, virtualization needs its own elevator pitch. My previous analogy was that like a person living in The Matrix (movie reference), an application running in a virtual environment thinks that environment is real. The idea is that you have a standard environment (compute resources, storage, networking, etc.) in which you run applications. This enables an enterprise to build up a data center using whatever hardware they want, but the applications won’t see that hardware, they see only the virtual environment. One of the typical use cases is to have a Windows desktop as a virtual environment. This way you can run Windows applications on non-Windows machines, or can literally provide what looks to a user like a Windows machine, but actually is running on Linux.
So, back to The Matrix analogy, while you think you’re eating a nice juicy steak in a Windows world, you’re actually being fed intravenously in a pod in the real world. Unlike The Matrix, however, this is a good thing.
VMWare built its entire business on Virtualization (“VM” is often used to stand for “Virtual Machine”, which is the virtual environment), which was a good business for a time, but now there are Open Source versions (Nutanix uses one). Also, while virtualization is still useful, there was always the difficulties in setting up the server (which HCI solves for a set of common use cases), and the world has moved on from things like Windows Apps or even needing a desktop anymore. Virtualization is still necessary, it’s just not the be-all and end-all it was 10 years ago.
Unfortunately, virtualization needs its own elevator pitch.
Thanks Smog, now I have an idea what you are talking about.
Saul
I don’t know of any better way to answer the question of “does Nutanix have a better product than competition” other than looking at market share itself and looking at the Gartner magic quadrant. According to Gartner Nutanix is offering the best product in the hci market.
https://www.iwsconsulting.it/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/nuta…
This tells me about all I need to know about the quality of their product. They are further right and higher up than all their peers. I have not seen a study but I’m willing to bet that if someone focused on the stocks of small niche companies in the top right of the magic quadrant they would outpace the market as a whole. It is rare for a niche company like Nutanix to be in the very top right. Usually it’s an established company (ie Oracle or Microsoft) that is at least on par with a young up and comer.
Everything I see shows VMware and Nutanix basically tied for #1 when looking at HCI software only sales. However it was VMware that has increased share significantly over the past year.