Nutanix bets big on India: Largest R&D hub, key market for growth

India is at the heart of the company's strategy, both as its largest research and development (R&D) hub and as a fast-growing market, said Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami in an interaction with CNBC-TV18.

With engineering centres in Bengaluru and Pune, Nutanix continues to expand its India operations while maintaining market leadership in hybrid cloud infrastructure, the CEO said.

Nutanix reinvests nearly a quarter of its revenue into R&D, ensuring rapid innovation in areas such as AI, Kubernetes, and modern cloud-native platforms. This has enabled offerings like "GPT-in-a-Box," now evolved to support advanced agentic AI applications.

On talent, Ramaswami said that H1B visas are important because they allow access to world-class developers globally. He himself began his US career on an H1B. However, Nutanix is not reliant solely on this channel, with strong hiring capabilities in India and other regions, he said.

Discussing differentiation, Ramaswami pointed to three factors that set Nutanix apart - a simple yet resilient platform trusted for mission-critical workloads, unmatched flexibility and portability across environments without vendor lock-in, and exceptional customer support reflected in a Net Promoter Score above 90 for over 10 years.

He mentioned how Nutanix is enabling enterprises to adopt AI, whether through customer applications like fraud detection or call compliance monitoring, internal productivity tools, or AI-powered features inside Nutanix products.

India figures prominently among Nutanix's success stories, with Apollo Hospitals, Apollo Pharmacy, and leading banks running core operations on its platform. Globally, the US Navy has trusted Nutanix on hospital ships for nearly a decade without downtime.

Ramaswami sees the biggest growth potential in Asia-Pacific, particularly India, while also deepening collaborations with Indian startups and partners. With 29,000 customers today out of a total addressable market of 200,000, Nutanix's opportunity remains vast, both in acquiring new customers and expanding within existing ones.

He further said that Indian businesses are leading the charge in digital and AI-native applications, and Nutanix aims to be their trusted partner in balancing legacy workloads with next-generation innovation.

Meanwhile, Nutanix also partnered with Lenovo Group to deepen their collaboration in India, focusing on delivering advanced enterprise cloud and AI solutions tailored to the region's growing digital infrastructure needs.

Lenovo has begun manufacturing servers in its Pondicherry factory. As part of Lenovo's global-local strategy to Make in India for India and for the world, these servers are equipped with Neptune® Liquid Cooling to boost server processing and system speeds for AI-driven, high-performance applications and are also powered by Nutanix software.Read about our editorial guidelines and ethics policy