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Rivalry between Nutanix and VMware had been heating up for a few years before exploding in an all-out battle this last December. Nutanix lured away one of VMware’s top product executives, Rajiv Ramaswami, to replace its outgoing CEO. VMware – which would soon thereafter also lose its own highly successful chief executive, Pat Gelsinger, to Intel – responded with a lawsuit against Ramaswami, accusing him of breaching his contract.
These were only the latest salvos in a relationship that started as a partnership but eventually morphed into a bitter fight, as the overlap between the markets the two companies compete in grew.
“The lawsuit is a validation of Nutanix as a perceived threat within VMware’s walls,” Matt Kimball, a senior data center analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said.
VMware and Nutanix were allies in the early days of the hyperconverged infrastructure market, which Nutanix pioneered. Its first product, launched in 2011, was an appliance that integrated servers, storage, networking, and virtualization. VMware’s vSphere provided the virtualization part. Enterprises loved the concept.
As the hyperconverged-infrastructure market took off, in the mid-2010s, VMware developed its own hyperconverged product, vSAN, while Nutanix released Acropolis, its own hypervisor. Suddenly, they became competitors.
Fast forward to today, and the two are also rivals in the hybrid, multi-cloud market, not just hyperconvergence. Both leveraged their respective hyperconverged infrastructure software to build competing cloud management platforms for managing on-premises data centers and hybrid, multi-cloud environments.
“The space in which these two vendors are competing is only increasing,” Naveen Chhabra, a Forrester Research analyst, told DCK. “Three years back it was only [hyperconverged infrastructure]. Today they are competing on almost every offering.”
Nutanix ‘Needs to Go’ Where VMware Is
Analysts say hiring Ramaswami was smart move on Nutanix’s part. He replaced Dheeraj Pandey, who co-founded the San Jose, California-based company and saw it reach $1.3 billion in annual revenue before retiring.
Nutanix is the young up-and-coming counterweight to the $11 billion juggernaut that is Palo Alto-based VMware. As VMware’s former COO of products and cloud services, Ramaswami knows the hyperconverged infrastructure and cloud management platform business – as well as VMware – inside and out.