Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami tells CRN how the company has expanded beyond hyperconverged infrastructure into hybrid cloud, AI inferencing, external storage and partner-led services opportunities to build a platform that provides customers and partners unequaled infrastructure flexibility and choice. Anyone who thinks of Nutanix strictly as a developer of hyperconverged infrastructure should have a discussion with Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami. Nutanix has actually evolved from its HCI roots into a cloud software infrastructure platform for virtual machines, containers, AI applications, public clouds and external storage, Ramaswami told CRN in an exclusive conversation and as part of a short press conference after the company’s fiscal 2027 financial report. Ramaswami told CRN the company’s core mission is letting customers run any app and manage data anywhere, from on-premises to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and GPU-focused neoclouds. [Related: Nutanix Turns Up The Heat On AI, Hybrid Cloud And Partner-Led Growth] “We offer customers a lot of flexibility and choice in a single platform,” he said. “They can run their VMs [virtual machines] or containers equally well. They can run on-prem or in the public cloud equally well. Licensing is flexible. You buy a license, you can use it anywhere, and you can run whatever you want.” That run-anywhere mantra extends to AI, where Ramaswami said Nutanix provides choice to help customers reduce costs. “AI on Nutanix is all about landing customer applications on the Nutanix platform, and this is where our full agentic experience comes into play,” he said. “Today, if you look at the different layers in the stack, our software stack at the silicon layer runs on Nvidia GPUs but will soon be running on AMD GPUs as well.” Ramaswami also told CRN that AMD’s recent $250 million investment in Nutanix will help Nutanix support AMD GPUs. “It’s a joint development effort,” he said. “We work together as [AMD develops] GPUs because we will be supporting those GPUs. We get access to them. And we also get to provide that as a choice to our customers.” For channel partners, Ramaswami said Nutanix’s broader portfolio creates more opportunities around modernization, containers, AI, cloud, migrations and mitigating component shortages. “We are not a services company,” he said. “We provide some level of services, but we’re very happy to have our channel partners take on the services piece completely, and from a channel partner’s perspective, this is where they can add value to their customers and value for themselves.” There’s a lot going on at Nutanix. To learn more, read CRN’s conversation with Ramaswami. Nutanix is a cloud software infrastructure platform company that provides a full software stack on top of which companies of all shapes and sizes run their existing business-class applications and their modern applications, including their AI applications, anywhere, and manage all the data. The key thing is any app, all the data, managing it anywhere. That’s what we do today as a platform. If you look at the platform at this point compared to where we were, most folks know us as founding the HCI market. We continue to be the leaders in that category. But we’ve evolved this company from being an on-prem HCI company to extend our platform to run on top of the three major clouds: AWS, Azure and Google. We now support a variety of external storage, so we don’t only have HCI. We now have a full cloud stack with compute, storage, networking, operations, automation, management, etc. And storage becomes one of the options: HCI or external storage. We also have a platform today which allows customers to run modern applications. One of our value propositions is that customers can mix and match containerized applications with virtual machine applications. And finally, with our more recent product portfolio announcements, we have a platform for running agentic AI applications. So we’re one platform to
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