Nutanix

And we've had some really nice success stories.

Obviously, they're not directly our success stories, but we've enjoyed seeing the success of our past winners like Nutanix, Scalar, you know, numerous others that have done incredibly well, including a few IPOs as well as acquisitions and mergers.

Yeah, that's a couple of great examples.

And, you know, it really is evidence.

Oh, gosh.

Well, I'm obviously not the best person to say this because this is really what I've been told by them.

But I was actually speaking to somebody who was the head of comms for Nutanix when they won Declan Waters.

So Declan and I were chatting, catching up on things.

Yeah, I mean, the costs that show up because of this is not just the licensing fees, right? It's the now you need to go likely procure new hardware because you got to keep your existing infrastructure up and running.

So you can't just say, hey, we're going to move to Nutanix, you name the virtualization platform out there.

You now have to go procure brand new equipment because you got to keep the lights on on the existing infrastructure.

You then have to pay licensing for that new provider.

Though we have a great partnership with Nutanix and we work through these things, there might be other virtualization platforms that say, we're not giving you a path to get there.

You have to start paying us the minute you provision the infrastructure.

So now you stand up all this new hardware, which you have to procure.

You have to have somebody that actually knows how to get this up and running.

right?

It's got the subtitle, How the Best B2B CMOs Are Rewriting the Role, and it's based on interviews with more than 50 B2B CMOs at companies including Zoom, Salesforce, Nutanix, Snowflake, PagerDuty, and Sprout Social.

It's quite a weighty report and it's not gated or anything like that.

I mean, it's a bit like a lot of the research that we refer to here.

Mandy Dhaliwal, which I'm not sure I pronounced that.

So sorry, Mandy, if I didn't get that right.

But she's the CMO of Nutanix, which that's the way you pronounce Nutanix.

And she says, as a C-suite executive, I lead as a business strategist first, marketer second.

You know, my last company was called Cohesity.

And the one before that was called Nutanix.

So I'm the founder of two previous companies.

Both of them, fortunately, are doing north of a billion dollars in ARR.

When I took a look back at the space, some of the problems that we worked on back then, 25, 26 years ago, are still unsolved.

Ask any attacker or hacker what's the best way to get into a company, it's going to be to compromise someone's identity.

If you look at the CISO surveys, the buyer surveys, identity is always one or two on the priority list.

I knew that it was top of mind for the buyers with this big disruption coming with agents.

And I mean, you've been in cybersecurity for 26 years, give or take.

Yeah, I left and did some other stuff in data infrastructure.

So I had an amazing run at this company, Nutanix.

I was there about five years.

I guess my head immediately goes to, this is going to get uglier and scarier before it gets better.

Sean O'Dowd is the Head of Financial Services Solutions at Nutanix.

This is the Tech Barometer Podcast.

I'm Jason Lopez.

On this podcast, we talk to O'Dowd about the 2026 Enterprise Cloud Index, or ECI.

It's Nutanix's annual global research survey on IT trends.

When we asked him how financial services are doing overall, he compares what's happening to things like the shift from human labor to mechanized factory production in the late 1800s, or the way nuclear technology reshaped geopolitics, or even how space exploration, which had a big front-end investment, ultimately proved transformative.

So I say it's going to get uglier before it gets better because, as we all appreciate, when you look at these awe technologies, the disruption, the market structure changes, especially in financial, this has the potential to really upside a lot.

Two technical experts that I am pleased to bring on to the program, we're actually going to go through something that they covered at Accelerate.

But if you are interested in the landscape, you're looking interested in VCF and Nutanix, in Azure Local, in Hyper-V, I'm naming off all these things to keep people hooked in.

That's what we're going to do.

I want to talk about the latest and greatest of where we are now with EverPure with those technologies coming onto the program for the first time both the uh alex carver on my left from the product team very integral in virtualization side matt webb more recently to the company year and a half ish now year

Yeah, super fun.

Okay.

We're going to keep us moving, though, and go into one that continues to get pretty exciting, right, is that Nutanix space.

And

Today, we welcome Srinivas Bandi, co-founder of Orasesell.

Srinivas has had an incredible career in the engineering teams of organizations such as VMware, Nutanix, Harness, and is now co-founding one of the most exciting AI GTM companies on the planet.

In this episode, we explore the fundamentals of understanding what is a defensible moat, critical criteria to understand the future-proof of organizations in the AI revolution.

We talk about the pace of innovation in the AI industry with predictions about the future.

Um, I started with VMware as, you know, an early-ish employee, a few hundred people, uh, at VMware, and then I've spent about eight years there, built all parts of the virtualization stack.

Uh, and by the time I left, it was 22,000 people.

Uh, then I went on to Nutanix, also of just a few hundred people, built their second product, uh, it's called Acropolis Hypervisor, which became a big part of their, uh, you know, revenue, uh, over the six years I was there.

Followed by my stint at Harness, which is where I met my co-founder and CEO, Jason Eubanks.