While VMware was cutting down its number of Cloud Service Provider (CSP) partners at VMware Explore this week, HCI rival Nutanix reported a surge in customers that its CEO attributed to channel engagement.

Nutanix completed a successful fiscal year with quarterly revenue of $653 million, a 19% year-over-year increase. For the year, Nutanix recorded revenue of $2.54 billion, up 18% year-over-year. Non-GAAP net income in fiscal year '25 was $476 million and its $188 million of GAAP income represented its first year of positive GAAP income.

Nutanix added 2,700 customers in the year to bring its total to around 29,000. CEO Rajiv Ramaswami credited the surge in customers to Nutanix’s embrace of the channel as it chases organizations looking to migrate off VMware.

“Those 2,700 customers did not come by themselves. The channel was involved with all those customers,” Ramaswami said in a post-earnings report briefing. “We service them through our channel partners, and the smaller the customer is, the more the channel plays a front-and-center role. All those [smaller] customers’ partners have come to us. Clearly the partners have been influential in getting these customers, working together with hand-in-hand with us to get these customers. They still have to do a migration for those customers and that takes time, but the partners are certainly leaning in with us right now more than they were before.”

Nutanix updated its go-to-market initiatives and product platform to work better with cloud service providers (CSPs) and managed service providers (MSPs) over the past year. Nutanix has also expanded partnerships with large vendors, such as Dell, Pure Storage, AWS, Nvidia and Google. Ramaswami said Nutanix landed two Global 2000 companies last quarter who had been using VMware virtualization with Dell PowerFlex storage.

“They wanted a replacement for VMware. They spent a lot of money on these Dell PowerFlex arrays, and they wanted to keep those going,” he said. “So we were able to go in there and say, ‘we can work with your existing PowerFlex storage and your existing servers, and you run our software on top of the server so we can connect, and your experience is even better than what it was before.’”

Another new large customer for Nutanix is German-based Finanz Informatik, which plans to migrate Windows and Linux workloads from VMware virtual machines to Nutanix’s AHV hypervisor over the next two years.

Ramaswami said it’s still only “the second inning” in Nutanix’s efforts to win VMware customers. He said he can see the opportunity lasting for 10 years.

“We added 2,700 customers this year, and I'm very grateful for those customers who joined,” he said. “But there's 200,000 VMware customers out there.”

Nutanix forecast 2026 fiscal year revenue of $2.9 billion to $2.94 billion, which is 15% year- over-year growth at the midpoint of the range.