Nutanix executives said at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference on Tuesday, September 8, 2026, that the company's push into cloud and non-core solutions is gaining pace as it broadens beyond hyperconverged infrastructure. The company has a market capitalization of $18.2 billion, shares that have returned 69% over the past six months, and free cash flow of $841 million over the last 12 months.
Management outlined a path toward higher profitability, with fiscal 2027 operating margin guidance of 24% to 25% and a longer-term target of more than 30% operating margins. CFO Rukmini Sivaraman said external storage and supply-chain conditions are expected to be a headwind in 2027, while core demand remains strong. Management also said server prices are 4 to 5 times higher than a year ago.
Nutanix's install base is still dominated by external storage connected to third-party servers, which represents about 80% of the base, while hyperconverged infrastructure accounts for about 20%. The company said HCI adoption took 15 years to reach that 20% level and characterized VMware migration as a five- to 10-year journey. Gartner data cited by the company showed only 7% of customers plan to stay with VMware long-term.
The company's cloud portfolio includes Nutanix Cloud Clusters, or NC2, which runs across AWS, Azure and other clouds, as well as the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform and Nutanix Database Solution. Management said these non-core offerings are becoming a larger part of the business, with land-and-expand bookings from non-core solutions expected to grow from the low 20s percentage two years earlier to about one-third by fiscal 2029.
Nutanix also described its internal AI strategy. The company invested a one-time $20 million in internal GPU clusters running open-weight models, which management expects will last about five years and service roughly 80% of internal AI needs, with the remaining 20% handled through frontier models. CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said Nutanix is positioned to be an underlying platform for enterprise AI applications, adding that AI is expected to be deployed widely across enterprises.
Customer examples included State Street Bank, which deployed Nutanix at a large scale across AWS and Azure, and a large Asia-Pacific financial services customer that selected Nutanix as a second Kubernetes vendor alongside an existing VMware relationship. A large Fortune 500 customer used Nutanix to migrate to the public cloud while maintaining application compatibility and managing databases.
