Nutanix (NASDAQ:NTNX) used its 2026 Investor Day—held alongside its .NEXT user conference—to outline product initiatives, partner announcements, and medium-term financial targets, while also addressing customer trends ranging from agentic AI to supply chain constraints.
Investor Day framed around customer momentum and “normalized” FY2029 assumptions
VP of Investor Relations Richard Valera said Nutanix chose to pair Investor Day with .NEXT so investors could “get an in-person view of our customers and our partners,” noting the “current geopolitical and supply chain backdrop” makes it an “interesting time” to provide updates.
CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said Nutanix is positioned at an industry “inflection point,” pointing to infrastructure modernization, public cloud adoption, modern applications, and the “shift to agentic AI.” He emphasized three takeaways for investors: Nutanix’s “unified modern platform,” an expanded market opportunity, and a financial model intended to deliver “durable growth and profitability” and “Rule of 40-plus” performance.
AI “decisive shift” toward inferencing and agentic workloads
Ramaswami argued the industry is shifting “from training to inferencing and agentic,” which he said is “very much in our sweet spot.” He described Nutanix’s Agentic AI approach as delivering a “cloud operating model” for “AI factories” by providing a turnkey software layer to help customers operationalize AI across hybrid environments.
He outlined the stack as including AI services and Kubernetes, core infrastructure optimization (including GPU utilization and security), a data foundation intended to support low-latency streaming and data preparation, and management for multi-tenant governance and isolation.
On competitive positioning, Ramaswami said Nutanix’s “right to win” stems from customers already trusting the platform for critical applications and extending that platform with integrated capabilities rather than point products. He also reiterated a “thesis that AI will be hybrid,” driven by sovereignty, regulation, data proximity, and real-time edge inferencing needs.
During Q&A, Ramaswami said Nutanix is targeting “neo clouds” and service providers with elements of the agentic AI stack, including what he called “Service Provider Central,” aimed at enabling multi-tenant shared GPU infrastructure.
External storage expands addressable market, with focus on IP networking
Ramaswami detailed how external storage support is intended to expand Nutanix’s serviceable market within the private cloud portion of hybrid cloud infrastructure. He said the private cloud portion of the hybrid cloud infrastructure market in 2026 is “roughly about a $30 billion market,” and that with “HCI only” Nutanix can serve about “35%” of it. With additional external storage platforms, he said served addressability increases to about “45%” this year, and Nutanix expects it could reach “about 60% of the TAM” by 2029 as it adds more platforms and as IP-based storage grows.
He also said Nutanix is “squarely focused on the IP Ethernet connected market” and does not support Fibre Channel, calling Fibre Channel “a legacy architecture.”
In Q&A on execution, Ramaswami pointed to early customer activity with Dell PowerFlex and Nutanix’s external storage offerings, citing PowerFlex customers “in production today” and referencing customer remarks about adoption of “Everpure.” He added that NetApp would arrive “at the end of the year,” and that broad adoption typically lags GA availability as customers test in production environments.
Broadcom-VMware displacement described as multi-wave opportunity
Ramaswami said Nutanix views the Broadcom-VMware disruption as “one more element” of its growth story, but acknowledged it remains top of mind for investors. Citing Gartner research, he said a growing share of customers have a negative perception of Broadcom, describing a migration trend that occurs in “multiple waves” tied to customer renewal cycles and potential future pressure to move to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), which he said can resemble “a full forklift upgrade.”
Ramaswami said there are “300,000+ customers for Broadcom VMware,” with Nutanix focusing on about “165,000” enterprise and commercial customers. He said Nutanix has about “30,000” customers today, adding “over 3,000 customers in the last four quarters,” including “about 1,000” added in the most recent quarter.
He also emphasized ongoing work to reduce migration friction through broader hardware support and automated tooling, noting that much of the effort is in planning and program management rather than the actual move, which he said is “almost all…automated.”
FY2029 model targets: mid- to high-teens growth, mid/high-20s operating margins, high-20s free cash flow margin
CFO Rukmini Sivaraman framed the medium term as fiscal 2029, assuming “a normalized supply chain environment” and “a stable market backdrop.” She reviewed performance since Nutanix’s 2023 Investor Day, saying the company delivered “a 17% CAGR” in revenue versus a prior 15% target and “a 19% CAGR” in ARR versus a prior 20% target, while outperforming prior commitments on profitability and free cash flow metrics. She said Nutanix achieved a “Rule of 40 score of 48” in its most recent fiscal year, compared to a prior expectation of “less than 40” at the 2023 Investor Day.
Looking ahead, Sivaraman said Nutanix targets FY2029 revenue and ARR growth in the “mid- to high-teens%,” with non-GAAP operating margin in the “mid- to high-20s%,” and free cash flow margin in the “high 20s%.” She added that the resulting Rule of 40 outcome would be “in the low- to mid-40s.”
She also highlighted a portfolio mix shift, saying “portfolio solutions” accounted for about “21%” of land-and-expand ACV bookings in fiscal 2025, with an expectation of “34%” by fiscal 2029. She said Nutanix’s net revenue retention rate was “107%” as of the most recent quarter.
On supply chain, Sivaraman acknowledged that while Nutanix is a software provider, customers still need servers to run the platform. She described mitigation efforts including certifying more platforms, enabling reuse of existing infrastructure via external storage, supporting public cloud deployment through NC2, and offering commercial flexibility such as license start dates tied to hardware delivery. In Q&A, she said the near-term supply chain situation remained “more or less as we told you at our last earnings call.”
On capital allocation, Sivaraman said Nutanix’s priorities include organic investment and “opportunistic M&A,” maintaining liquidity for its convertible notes (with the first due in 2027), and ongoing share repurchases. She noted Nutanix’s first accelerated share repurchase was “$300 million” in December and said the company announced a “$750 million increase” in its share repurchase authorization. She also said Nutanix is targeting “net dilution…of less than 2% going forward” and described continued efforts to reduce stock-based compensation as a percentage of revenue, citing “14%” in the most recent fiscal year versus “more than 20%” previously.
About Nutanix (NASDAQ:NTNX)
Nutanix, Inc is an enterprise cloud computing company that develops software to simplify the deployment and management of datacenter infrastructure. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Jose, California, Nutanix is best known for pioneering hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), an approach that integrates compute, storage and virtualization into a single software-defined platform aimed at reducing complexity and operational overhead in private and hybrid cloud environments.
The company’s product portfolio centers on the Nutanix Cloud Platform, which includes its core AOS software for HCI, Prism for infrastructure management and automation, and a suite of additional services such as Calm for application automation, Files and Volumes for file and block services, Karbon for Kubernetes orchestration, and Era for database management.
