Startups, enterprises, rethink cloud strategies amid rapid digital transformation: Nutanix MD

With the pandemic forcing companies to increasingly adopt digital models of doing business, the process of migrating existing applications and solutions from private to public clouds and vice versa, is gaining traction.

Elaborating on the trend that is known as 'cloud repatriation' in industry parlance, Faiz Shakir, managing director-sales of the India and SAARC region for Nutanix, said in a recent interaction that while most companies are moving from private to public cloud environments, digital native ones are also recognizing the importance of using both public and private clouds together--the so-called trend of adopting a hybrid cloud environment. 

“Customers now want the best of both worlds. We see a lot of customers saying - here are my requirements from different workloads that I want to run on a private cloud, but you need to give me a gateway where I have the option to move to the public cloud seamlessly, without having to change my strategy,” Shakir explained. 

US-based Nutanix is a cloud computing firm that provides virtualization software to enterprises, which helps manage multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud infrastructure (HCI).

Nutanix is a cloud computing company that operates in the hyperconverged infrastructure or HCI space, which is defined as a unified system that houses computing, storage, and networking technologies in a single system. VMware and Nutanix have been ranked first and second, respectively, in the latest Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for HCI. Nutanix competes with companies like VMWare, Citrix Systems, Red Hat and more in India, that have also seen growth in the demand for cloud computing tools.

In a November 2021 report, the International Data Corporation (IDC) noted that revenue from India’s public cloud services (PCS) market totaled $2.2 billion for the first half of 2021. The market research firm said it expected this revenue to touch $10.8 billion by 2025, growing at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.1% till then.

“Cloud continues to be the foundational pillar for innovation, collaboration, and digital transformation, and is witnessing an accelerated adoption by enterprises in India. Organizations in India cite increased investment plans for cloud infrastructure and platforms in the coming 12 months to aid in faster and more effective ways of application development and access to technologies,” Rishu Sharma, Associate Research Director, Cloud and Artificial Intelligence, IDC India, said when releasing the report.

Much of this growth will come from legacy players adopting more digital services. For instance, Shakir said Nutanix has only recently received an order from a large private bank based in Mumbai, which wants to run its entire disaster management operations from the public cloud. He noted that this is amongst the largest orders the company has in India.

“New age companies are able to move a lot of their critical workloads to the public cloud, because they don't use many legacy applications and it’s easier for them to start (on the public cloud),” he explained. He added, though, that traditional enterprises like banks, IT/ITES companies, and large healthcare providers use a lot of legacy applications, and those need to run largely in the private cloud and in the old on-premise format. "I think it all depends on how aged is your IT infrastructure, how aged are the applications and the modernization of all of that,” he said.

That said, Shakir acknowledged that digital native firms have started to move part of their workloads to on-premise private cloud operations, having realised that running solely on public cloud environments isn’t a commercially feasible solution for them.