Pandemic increased shift to subscription model in India: Nutanix CEO

Nutanix chief executive Rajiv Ramaswami said the Covid-19 pandemic had increased a shift to its subscription model in India as customers focused on saving costs in the early days of the virus outbreak.

The company shifted to a subscription model over a year ago and the uptake had been relatively slow among companies in the country.

Ramaswami, who took over as chief executive of the $1.5 billion hyper converged Cloud infrastructure company nine months ago, said India would be a big contributor to its projected 25% growth in annual contract value over the next four years.


“I look at this as a big opportunity, not just in terms of driving sales. We have a large and growing customer base across almost every vertical, but we also have our largest development centre here,” Ramaswami told ET in an interview.

The company’s biggest development centres are in Bengaluru and Pune.

It works with most large system integrators like Infosys and Wipro.

Nutanix did not disclose its headcount in India.

Last year, the India business grew 68%, even as the company, which builds software that helps enterprises manage their applications on the cloud, grew at 14%.

Ramaswami expected the growth to continue as the digitisation wave across industries continues.

“As companies go digital, they are modernizing their infrastructure, they're creating modern applications and monitoring them on modern infrastructure -- cloud is becoming an operating model,” he said.

Enabling a hybrid workforce is another factor.

“These trends are going to continue, they are not short-term trends. And that's what's going to continue driving our growth,” he said.

Partnerships will be an important part of the company’s strategy to provide a complete solution to customers, he said. This is one of the key priorities along with driving the transition to a 100% subscription business (currently it is at 90%) and going after the next wave of renewals which will help drive faster growth for the company, he said.

Nutanix is adding about 700 new customers every quarter and currently has about 20,000 clients across the world.

Most of its core R&D work happens out of India, with several products being headquartered and delivered out of Bengaluru.

“India continues to grow rapidly, we continue to hire people there quite a bit across all functions," said Ramaswami.

In the long term, he expects people to return to office following a hybrid model where people go to office to collaborate a few days of the week.