According to a recent report by Emergen Research, the global Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) market size is estimated to grow at 26.8% to reach $48.17 billion by 2028 from $ 7.34 billion in 2020. The growth in the industry is driven by the rising demand for data security and disaster recovery solutions. Nutanix (Nasdaq: NTNX), recently reported its third-quarter results that continued to surpass market expectations, but the weak outlook was not looked upon favorably by the stock market.

Nutanix’s Financials

For the third quarter of the year, revenues grew 17% to $403.7 million, ahead of the market’s forecast by 1.35%. ACV billings grew 28%to $204.7 million. Net loss was $0.05 per share, compared to the market’s estimates of a net loss of $0.22 per share.

By segment, Nutanix’s Product revenues grew 15.8% to $199.6 million while revenues from support, entitlements and other services grew 18.5% to $204 million.

For the fourth quarter, Nutanix forecasts revenues of $340-$360 million. For the fiscal year, it expects revenues of $1.535-$1.555 billion. The market forecasts revenues of $438.51 million for the fourth quarter and $1.63 billion for the fiscal year.  

Nutanix’s Cloud Expansion

Recently, Nutanix announced the availability of its simplified product portfolio to align with rapidly evolving customer requirements. The Nutanix Cloud Platform delivers a consistent operating model across all types of clouds. The launch further streamlines customers’ digital transformations by delivering an easy-to-consume set of solutions. The new portfolio also removes the complexity associated with enabling a full range of hybrid cloud services across multiple environments by simplifying packaging, metering, and pricing to allow customers to easily plan as per their changing needs such as workload expansions, cloud preferences, tech refreshes, and more. Customers also have the ability to further accelerate their cloud journey by using Nutanix validated designs and deployment best practices for common use cases.

The industry is pleased with Nutanix’s product offerings. In a recent Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Hyper Converged Infrastructure and Files and Systems Object Store, Nutanix had received rave reviews for its high levels of customer satisfaction with both the core Nutanix Cloud Platform and Unified Storage Solutions. It was also named a major player in IDC’s MarketScape in Distributed Scale-Out File System market 2022 vendor assessment report.

Like many others in the industry, Nutanix is also facing supply chain challenges. During the last quarter, it saw a significant increase in delays with its hardware partners. Nutanix expects these challenges to continue in the coming quarters. It also believes that the demand for its hybrid multi-cloud platform remains strong, and will help offset the impact of the delays arising out of these macro challenges.

The converged infrastructure market is a highly fragmented one that is dominated by bigger vendors including VMWare, Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco. Nutanix has a tough market landscape to compete in, but it believes that its product offerings will help it stand apart from these giants. Read the inspiring story of Nutanix Founder Dheeraj Pandey whom I interviewed recently.

Its stock is currently trading at a 52-week low of $16.61 with a market capitalization of $3.7 billion. It was trading at a 52-week high of $44.50 in September last year.