1/ This morning we are having a Nutanix internal (& very emotional) goodbye celebration for @dheeeraj. I want to take the opportunity for some personal observations/opinions on the company he built, & on how it continues to disrupt the IT industry.

2/ When Dheeraj & @sudheesh approached me in early 2012 about potentially working at Nutanix, it was a tiny start-up. I had recently moved up to Tahoe where I envisioned a cushy consulting career drawing upon on my years of legacy datacenter & financial analysis background.

3/ I was blown away when they showed me their tech which brought the same type of web-scale architecture Google had pioneered in the Cloud to enterprises. The company’s marketing in those days was “No SAN”

4/ But then I started 2nd-guessing myself. I had spent 20 years in the channel and knew all too well about the stranglehold that the handful of datacenter multi-billion-dollar giants had not only on the datacenter, but on the reseller channel.

5/ The incumbents’ stronghold made it difficult for innovative upstarts to break into the datacenter. Fusion-IO was an early user of the new flash technology. The firm was extremely well-funded and had Apple co-founder and industry icon, Steve Wozniak, as chief scientist.

6/ Despite an IPO of $2B in June of 2011, SanDisk acquired Fusion-IO three years later for only 1B. Another early flash provider, Violin Memory, filed for bankruptcy three years after its 2011 IPO.

7/ Tintri made it all the way to 2018 before filing for bankruptcy. The incumbents augmented their start-up kill zones by acquiring companies showing signs of innovation such as Whiptail, Texas Memory Systems and Nimble Storage.

8/ And even after Nutanix entered the scene, the incumbents have continued gobbling up innovative storage companies including 3Par, XtremeIO, ScaleIO, Nimble, & Datrium.

9/ As impressed as I was w/Nutanix's technology & people, I thought to myself, does a 60-person start-up have even a prayer against the DC oligopolists?

10/ I didn't join, but as I watched Nutanix's explosive growth over the next year, I began to think this scrappy start-up had a real possibility of pulling off one of the biggest business upsets of the decade.

11/ I gave up my dream of a cushy consulting career & went back to work 70 hours a week at a start-up start March of 2013.

12/ But what an extraordinary opportunity it’s been to see Nutanix indeed change the industry. All the storage giants who formerly scoffed at the notion of HCI now have 1 or more HCI offerings. HCI has become a DC standard and continues to grow rapidly.

13/ IMO, Nutanix’s next disruption was its KVM-based hypervisor, AHV. At the time, I didn’t know if another hypervisor would be accepted in the market – but the cloud providers paved the way with their own KVM / Linux-based hypervisors.

14/ Today, ½ of Nutanix’s customers run AHV and it wins rave reviews for its simplicity and performance. As with public cloud virtualization, it is largely invisible.

15/ And Nutanix has continued to leverage its web-scale architecture to bring extraordinary new efficiencies to the DC including: DevOps, security (micro-segmentation), extraordinarily simple business continuity, database automation (lowering TCO 50%+) & much more.

16/ Nutanix Clusters went GA last Sept, & is already winning awards & is poised to disrupt hybrid cloud. It abstracts public cloud much in the way HCI abstracted storage years ago.

17/ Clusters accelerates migration to, & management of, public cloud while reducing cost. It also derisks many aspects of public cloud by enabling cloud mobility.

18/ I think there are around only 40 software companies to achieve billion dollar run rates. @Dheeraj is in a more exclusive club than U.S. presidents (thanks @wjconrad)

19/ @thinkx tells the story that, as a customer, he attended Nutanix .Next Miami in 2015. A panel moderator asked, “In five years, where do you expect to see yourself?” - the usual panellist closing question that asks very little and expects a lot.

20/ @Dheeraj responded, “In five years, I’d like to disrupt ourselves”. True to form, and character, Dheeraj has disrupted the comfortable continuum and set a new path for Nutanix, and for the industry.

21 (fini)/ I’m looking forward to continued disruption & massive customer benefits under the stewardship of @RajivRamaswami