Watch: Sankalp Saxena on the Nutanix strategy for growth in India’s HCI market

Earlier this month, enterprise cloud solutions provider Nutanix established a 200,000 square feet office in Bengaluru to host its sales, engineering, research and development, support and services functions under one roof.

“Our expansion plans are indexed to us, taking a twin city approach from an R&D and support perspective in India – with Bengaluru being our India headquarters and us now adding a second centre in Pune. That not only helps us attract more talent in Nutanix India, but also gives us continuity from a fail-over perspective,” Sankalp Saxena, senior vice president and managing director of operations in India told TechCircle in an interview.

Saxena also spoke on the growth of the hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) market in India.

HCI houses a format of data centre architecture that visualises the elements of hardware-defined systems. A key characteristic of these systems is their ability to provide all compute and storage functions over a single platform. Companies across the world have deployed HCI to augment their data centre capabilities.

In the global converged systems space, Nutanix stood second to VMWare, on the basis HCI software ownership market share, in the second quarter of 2019, according to findings of market research firm IDC. The company's India market share was over 47%, according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker for Q2 2019.

Over the years, the San Jose-headquartered company has pivoted from hardware to software to software subscription model in offering its products and solutions. The subscription-termed licenses, as opposed to traditional long-term contracts, are yet to prove their success over the financial year 2020 at Nasdaq.

“Subscription as a paradigm offers a very strong choice option for our customers, in how they choose to deploy, consume our solutions,” Saxena told TechCircle.

The subscription model, as opposed to its traditional long-term contracts counterpart, offers its clients an opex (operating expenditures)-aligned approach, instead of the capex (capital expenditures) that is associated with long-term deals.

Saxena holds more than 30 years of experience with companies and technology startups across the United States, Japan, and India. Prior to Nutanix, he served as founder of Transformation Labs, where he led a team that focused on identifying and mentoring early stage startups to bring innovative ideas to market. He has been responsible for customer acquisition, strategic partnerships, and global development centres for companies such as i2, SLK, and IBS. 

He holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from Lehigh University.