Nutanix is out in front - but can it stay ahead of the burgeoning pack?

Short version? Yes. Nutanix can make IPO if they want, and if nobody offers them a big enough bag of cash in the meantime. Those talks are continual, ongoing and multi-party, I am sure.

The thing to bear in mind is that Nutanix is neither stupid nor a one-trick pony. They are perfectly aware that their market is begin commoditised, and they have no intention of getting trapped playing the same game VMware has been playing for years. VMware has been trying to deny the commoditisation of the hypervisor while casting about desperately for something - anything - to lock everyone in to their specific hypervisor.

Nutnaix will admit - privately, if not publicly - that hyperconvergence is already a commodity. Their goal is to ride the wave at the top to see how much hay they can make until everyone else realizes that competitors like Maxta, Scale Yottabye and so forth exist, and then plowing that money into both brand building (name recognition!) and R&D. They have secret squirrel projects of their own to address tomorrow's problems, even as they are building out their sales for to sell the stuff that answers today's problems.

So far, so good. That's what you expect a company that isn't yet a lumbering monopoly in their field to do. Nutanix will shed market share as other competitors gain traction, but the market for hyperconvergence itself is growing at such a rate that they simply don't care. Let 1o other companies duke it out to be the Android of hyeprconvergence. As far they are concerned they're the iPhone of that market, and they'll dine on that for the better part of the next decade.

The losers here are the array vendors. Just look at EMC's numbers to grok that. "New storage" is growing rapidly. "Old storage" not so much. So there's plenty of money for the hyperconverged companies to gobble up. Who ends up with what slice of the pie is, when all is said and done, irrelevant.

It's irrelevant because the hyperconverged wars are over almost as soon as they began. This market has so many players it's been commoditised even before all the entrants are spun up. So the question isn't "who gets what slice of the pie" or even "who gets the high margin bit of the pie", but "who has a solution for to do five years from now where there's no more margin in hyperconvergence to be had at all?"

And to know that, you need to know what they're up to behind the scenes...and most of these folks are increasingly tight lipped about that...