“May 8, 2019 – Nutanix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, today announced the continued evolution of its offerings across private and public clouds, further making multi-cloud computing a reality for its customers. With today’s news Nutanix is extending its Xi Frame desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solution from the public cloud to the private cloud, enabling the delivery of apps and desktops in a true hybrid cloud environment.” Read the full press release.

Nutanix Xi Frame Extends DaaS Offering – What It Means for Hybrid Cloud and Desktop Virtualization

Analyst Take: This is an interesting announcement from Nutanix, and one that hits two different trends: Hybrid cloud and desktop virtualization. We’ve talked in the past about the value proposition of hybrid public/private cloud implementations. The reality is that most enterprises today, with the exception of “born digital native” organizations that have no legacy technology infrastructure, and are faced with the reality of existing private cloud/on-premises investments and applications that cannot or should not be abandoned for the cloud.

Beyond existing investments, some applications are just not designed to work well in the cloud, while others have data security and compliance issues that favor private/on-premises solutions.

So, while adoption of the cloud is growing incredibly fast—and fueling Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, and IBM’s Cloud growth—most organizations operate in a hybrid environment of legacy on-premises systems and cloud-based services.

In fact, research we published in early 2019 found that 81 percent of enterprises currently use a combination of public/private, on/off-premises solutions, with a third planning to actually increase their private on-premises investments. That report, Data Serving and Computing: the Hybrid Value Proposition can be downloaded here.

As for virtualization, the use of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is on the rise. VDI allows enterprise users to access cloud-based applications through any web browser as if the applications were resident on their laptop or desktop computer. The real value of VDI is in the ability to offer ANY application to be run on ANY computer from ANY location—and data security is another, btw—as data does not need to reside on the local computer.

So what’s the deal with the Nutanix Xi Frame announcement? They’ve taken a previously off-premises offering (available on AWS and Azure, for example) and extended it to private, on-premises data centers. It may not seem like a big deal, but the ability to have one management and application delivery system spanning public and private clouds is a good step, and one that offers solid flexibility for the 81 percent of enterprises looking to simplify their hybrid cloud operations.

Futurum Research provides industry research and analysis. These columns are for educational purposes only and should not be considered in any way investment advice. 

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