Case Study

In his own words: Founder/CEO, Dheeraj Pandey

Not just a cheaper, faster mousetrap

We were thinking of raising our Series B when we initially met with KV. Vinod saw parallels between Nutanix and Sun Microsystems, one of the torchbearers of client-server based computing at a time when datacenters were being re-architected away from monolithic mainframes. Sun was focused on building a radically new computing architecture, and similarly, Nutanix is a disruptive non-linear company, not just a cheaper, faster mousetrap.

Vinod was willing to bet on us--a company that had tons of naysayers who thought what we did was a “science project.” Once again, he was ready to make a bet on a new computing architecture and wasn’t afraid to disrupt the status quo.

Go ahead and pursue your dreams

Many times, your ambition is probably what limits you. You see all these accomplished and ambitious people around you--folks who have done so much in their careers and lives. The history around them gives you that belief, that conviction, to really try to up the game every year. Accomplished leaders like Vinod and Keith bring that sense of purpose and courage to everything we do here.

Accomplished leaders like Vinod and Keith bring that sense of purpose and courage to everything we do here.

Making enterprise infrastructure consumer-grade

We’re obviously bringing a lot of the engineering sophistication from web properties to the enterprise in the back-end. We’re also focused on making the front-end design simple and easy-to-use, basically making enterprise infrastructure consumer-grade.

The emphasis on design coming from KV is quite refreshing. Bringing in experts like Irene to our company has been extremely beneficial. Our design team spends a lot of time with her, which keeps us honest.

Apple is to personal computing as Nutanix is to enterprise computing

Before the iPhone, we used to have separate devices for everything from music players, cameras and GPS devices to calculators and voice recorders, not to mention PCs. When Apple built the iPhone, they converged two big pieces of the consumer world: the phone and the iPod. On top of that, they built a platform, which basically transformed many devices into pure software.

This is what's happening to the data center and what Nutanix is doing. We are building the iPhone for the data center. We’re following an Apple-like model, where we build our own appliances with our software. We also are following an Android model of giving our software to others to build their own Android-like devices.

The goal is to build uncompromisingly simple infrastructure.

We are not really a software company, and we are not really a hardware company. We are a computing company. We believe that the world will actually have four or five different computing islands, and we need to be everywhere: the private cloud and the public cloud, and we need to meld all of these together as one computing platform.

If you looked at Apple 10 years ago, it was a music company. Seven years ago, it was a phone company. When iPads came out, it became a mobile computing company. Now they're doing watches. They’re really a personal computing company.

What we're building here at Nutanix is an enterprise computing company. The goal is to build uncompromisingly simple infrastructure. We’re a rare enterprise infrastructure company that has a powerful “left-brain” (web-scale engineering) and an elegant “right-brain” (consumer-grade design).