New Delhi, Sept. 23 -- India has emerged as the largest market for Nutanix in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ), with the company sharpening its focus on artificial intelligence (AI), financial services, and cost-optimised IT infrastructure to drive growth.
Speaking at the .NEXT conference in Mumbai on Tuesday, Jay Tuseth, Vice President and General Manager for Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ), told TechCircle in an exclusive interaction that the company is witnessing the accelerated adoption of its hybrid multicloud platform in India, driven by demand from banks, digital-native enterprises, and increasingly, the public sector.
"India has become the largest market in APJ for us, and it is also the fastest-growing. Our core platform has become very sticky with customers, and once deployed, it allows them to expand into new areas like AI, Kubernetes, and database-as-a-service," Tuseth said.
AI and Kubernetes as growth engines
Among emerging technologies, AI and modern applications are driving Nutanix's next phase of growth in India. The company's Kubernetes platform (NKP), built on its core infrastructure, was recently positioned as a 'Challenger' in Gartner's Magic Quadrant and a 'Leader' in the Forrester Wave-recognition that Tuseth said has spurred adoption.
"AI is clearly a major driver in this region. Customers here often face budget and skills constraints, and the simplification we offer-embedding enterprise-scale Kubernetes and AI capabilities into one platform-gives us a strong edge," he explained.
Nutanix has also introduced Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI), its AI application infrastructure that allows enterprises to run workloads flexibly across cloud and on-premises. With AI workloads pushing up cloud costs, Tuseth noted that many organisations are repatriating AI applications back to their own data centres to gain better cost control and security. "We give customers the choice of where to run workloads, helping them rationalise AI costs against business benefits," he added.
Sectoral traction beyond BFSI
While Nutanix has historically been strong in banking and financial services, it is now expanding into other verticals. "We've seen tremendous momentum in healthcare and the public sector recently," Tuseth said.
India's digital-native startups are another high-growth segment, with enterprises using Nutanix's common platform to scale applications rapidly. According to market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), Nutanix holds nearly a 60% share in India's hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) market, indicating deep penetration across industries.
While budget constraints remain a key challenge for Indian CIOs, Tuseth admitted, he believes that large organisations here operate at a scale that dwarfs other markets. "Our ability to provide one highly scalable platform-whether for virtualisation, containers or AI-helps them cut costs and manage complexity across data centres, edge and public cloud," he said.
Tackling cloud costs and VMware exits
The company is also attracting both Indian and global customers, following Broadcom's acquisition of VMware. In an interview with TechCircle in May, CEO Rajiv Ramaswami mentioned, "Rising licensing fees, the transition to subscription-based models, and the bundling of certain products have generated uncertainty among some VMware clients, prompting them to explore alternatives,' he said, adding that Nutanix has acquired approximately 700 new customers each quarter, with nearly all of them transitioning to the Nutanix platform.
Tuseth agrees that Nutanix is further capitalising on enterprise concerns over rising cloud costs and vendor consolidation. "Our new logo acquisition last year hit a four-year high, largely because organisations want to move off VMware after the Broadcom acquisition. With Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV), we provide like-for-like hypervisor capability, but also extensibility into Kubernetes and AI," Tuseth said.
Notably, Nutanix AHV is a built-in hypervisor that unifies virtualisation and storage, simplifying management of VMs and containers. This shift, he added, has created "unprecedented demand" for Nutanix as a safe alternative for virtualisation, while opening cross-sell opportunities in AI and application modernisation.
Security and agentic AI
With AI adoption comes new security requirements. Nutanix is embedding role-based access controls and guardrails to secure large language model (LLM) data, while partnering with NVIDIA to strengthen its enterprise AI offerings.
On the emerging trend of agentic AI-AI systems capable of autonomous decision-making-Tuseth revealed that Nutanix is conducting workshops in India to help enterprises build their first agentic AI applications within hours. "There's a lot of executive-level demand for AI, but teams often struggle to get started. Our platform bridges that gap between strategy and execution," he said.
India as a development hub
Tuseth highlighted India's dual importance for Nutanix-as both a high-growth customer market and a key development centre. The company employs thousands of developers in India and is investing in customer-facing teams to strengthen local engagement.
"In the next year, our top three priorities for CIOs will be enabling AI adoption through our hybrid cloud platform, simplifying IT with one common platform for all workloads, and expanding our local support to help Indian enterprises scale," Tuseth said. Nutanix is also extending partnerships with hyperscale cloud providers and third-party storage vendors such as Dell and Pure Storage, giving enterprises more flexibility in workload and infrastructure management.
"Our role is to help organisations execute on cloud-smart strategies with portability and cost efficiency. And India is central to this journey," Tuseth said.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from TechCircle.