I'm so glad I met Nutanix's Dheeraj Pandey

“Silicon Valley’s history is filled with storied founders and legendary visionaries and Dheeraj Pandey has earned a place among them.” - Lightspeed Founder, Managing Director - Ravi Mhatra

I was quite surprised last Thursday when Dheeraj Pandey, CEO and co-founder of 11-year old Nutanix, announced he is going to retire. As a student of business and reader of entrepreneur autobiographies most of my life, I feel extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to see him build Nutanix, against all odds, from scrappy start-up to software giant. And, he created a whole new industry category of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) in the process. 

Battling an Entrenched Incumbency

The ability for Nutanix to emerge early as a billion-dollar datacenter player was impressive enough, but the feat is even more remarkable given the hostile competitive environment Nutanix faced from the start. According to IDC, by 2014 the top seven datacenter vendors accounted for $56B of the total $74B server and storage market. These industry giants quickly squelched or acquired innovative upstarts such as Whiptail, Texas Memory Systems, Fusion-IO, and Violin Memory. 

While the SAN-based infrastructure these datacenter incumbents produced was very complex, the complexity itself helped them maintain their dominant positions. They provided their Value Added Resellers (VARs) with ongoing training and certifications and the VARs, in turn, charged their customers professional services that often doubled the margin received from selling the storage products themselves. The VARs were often reluctant to risk the wrath of their SAN vendors by even mentioning an alternative disruptive technology.

When I first met Dheeraj in 2012, I was enthralled with his vision for providing cloud-like simplicity to on-premises datacenters at a fraction of the cost of legacy environments. But I also couldn’t see how a tiny start-up would possibly have a prayer of going up against the multi-billion dollar oligopolists and their entrenched VARs.

Over the next year, after watching Nutanix’s explosive growth and other accomplishments, I became convinced that Dheeraj had an excellent chance of pulling off one of the business upsets of the decade. I wanted to be a part of the fun, and joined the company in early 2013 as employee #192. And while the datacenter incumbents initially scoffed at the notion of running serious applications on HCI, today all the leading storage manufacturers offer one or more HCI solutions. 

Extending the Nutanix Cloud Platform

In 2015, Nutanix once again faced industry doubt and resistance when it introduced its own KVM-based hypervisor, “Nutanix AHV” as an integral element of the software stack rather than as an expensive and complex add-on. Once again, Dheeraj’s vision proved spot on as Gartner retired its magic quadrant for virtualization two years later in 2017. And today, every leading public cloud manufacturer, as well as Nutanix, offers an integrated Linux-based (all but Azure are KVM-based) virtualization platform that is simple, scalable and resilient.

Nutanix has continued to leverage its “webscale” core architecture to enable an entire suite of new products focused on innovation, simplicity, and customer delight. Just as Nutanix originally revolutionized enterprise storage, the company is now poised to disrupt hybrid cloud, database management, file services, disaster recovery, VM-based security, and more.

Humility

Many people assume Dheeraj must have come from money, but he actually came to the U.S. in 1997 with just $900. Through a combination of grit, vision, and an extraordinary work ethic, he lived the American dream and will certainly be remembered for defeating overwhelming odds in changing the IT industry. But less obvious is his humility. I have seen countless examples over the years of Dheeraj’s empathy and his eagerness to both help, and learn from, others.

Dheeraj has poured his heart and soul into Nutanix, and certainly deserves time off to spend with his family. I imagine it must be comforting for him to know that he leaves the company well-positioned for great things to come.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are the author and not necessarily those of Nutanix, Inc. or any of its other employees or affiliates.