Greetings board. Long time lurker/reader, first time poster. I followed this Nuantix discussion following some of the confusion in the market regarding their Xi Services. It seems the RBC memo discussed in this thread has confirmed the availability dates, but I just wanted to add some additional flavor based on some product assessments and publicly available information.
I appreciate Saul’s (and the board’s) research and feedback on Nuantix’s performance, customer satisfaction, and other extremely relevant factors. It is this thorough and clearly presented info that brings me back to this forum nearly every day. This being said, I do also believe it is important to understand some of the technical details of their current and future product offerings, as this can give us great insight into potential revenue growth and the timing of this potential growth.
I cannot speak to the potential delays of the Xi Services availability, but I can add some feedback based upon my initial evaluation and research of this product. First, the initial marketing of Xi is as an enabler of Disaster Recovery services (DR) for a customer’s private Data Center hosted applications. I would expect that over time, they will layer more features onto this foundation, but initially they have selected a very commonsense and valuable service for many of their existing customers, and likely many non-existing customers.
You can see from publicly available info that to provide this DR service from a customer’s primary Data Center location, Nuantix has partnered with Google, in order to host this DR service via Xi, in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP.) This was announced publicly in June 2017.
https://www.blog.google/topics/google-cloud/nutanix-and-goog…
https://www.nutanix.com/press-releases/2017/06/28/nutanix-te…
The key info gleaned here is that Nuantix is not competing with Google in the public cloud space, but rather partnering with them. As a sidenote, this will likely drive some competition in the Public Cloud hosting space, where I believe roughly AWS has a 60% market share, to MS’s 20% and Google’s 12%. Private to Public cloud migration, and the subsequent “Hybrid cloud management” is still a tricky area for many enterprise customers, and I believe this would be a differentiator for Google, with Nuantix serving as the main service provider.
Another key point, is that right now it seems Nuantix is setting up these services in GCP’s locations in the US only. This is key to note, as it gives us insight into the Global Xi Service availability, at least in 2018. Even though a large amount of customers would likely be in the NVA/West Coast availability zones, this would mean no customers hosting data/apps in Europe or Asia would likely be a 2018 target, until Nuantix and Google expand this service to other GCP Zones.
I know there were some good messages exchanged in this and other threads on Nuantix’s development methodologies and the rumors about product delivery slippage. I cannot comment with insight or research on if this is a current issue in the release of this product. I will however speculate that seeing that Nuantix will partner with Google to deliver this offering for Xi Services, that a large factor in the product readiness is likely the physical setup, testing and workload balancing and scaling across Google’s GCP Data Centers.
The fact that they must have Google support on this partnership in order to operate within Google’s DCs might be a positive factor for this product release. What remains to be seen, is whether Nuantix is going to deliver Xi exclusively through GCP, or via other DCs globally. This direction could be an additional level of insight into the potential service scope, competitive factors and overall revenue potential.
I hope this helps others with some additional fuel in their due diligence of Nuantix and in this tech space.
Notmalware