I would change the question to: Do they solve a business problem (VDI, computing at the remote sites/plants/mills or smaller datacenters or simply as a gateway to the public cloud) and/or save costs (in gear, software, and in facilities footprint and electricity/cooling), improve performance, and free up your expensive human workers to spend time being more innovative rather than reactive and spending their time just managing larger amounts of gear that tends to break down regularly?
I think finding the right questions is key, but I don’t think that’s it. What I want to know is, Is Nutanix more like Talend or Twilio? Both solved business problems, saved costs, etc, but Talend depended on a technology (Hadoop), and when it went out of favor, Talend’s offerings did too. Twilio isn’t dependent on any technology that I know of. They have created a network…an infrastructure…that solves the business problem. They’re not choosing a horse to bet on.
It seems to me, though I’m no techie, that NTNX has picked HCI to bet on, and built its core business around that. It has other innovative irons in the fire as you’ve pointed out, but I don’t know how big they are at present, or how much they depend on the HCI core offering.
I’m concerned there might be many other ways to solve the same problem other than HCI, and that it might fall out of favor like Hadoop, and that’s why I’m just not interested.
Bear