Who’s most likely to buy Nutanix? • TechCrunch

Last Friday, The Wall Street Journal quoted sources as saying that Nutanix was looking for a buyer. Some may not find that surprising given Nutanix’s recent financial performance, but the question is if the company were to sell, who would be the most likely to buy it, and would it be a better fit for a large public company or a private equity firm?

(At this point we cannot resist noting that, well, we expected this.)

Nutanix helps virtualize nearly every piece of hardware required to run a datacenter, which it calls hyperconverged infrastructure. It actually even sells its own hardware appliance loaded with the company’s set of services as one of its delivery methods. That puts it at the center of the hybrid cloud market. I know, that’s a lot of buzz words there, but the bottom line is that it can help companies bridge the gap between their datacenters and public cloud offerings from companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

That makes Nutanix a pretty valuable commodity these days. In spite of the massive growth of these public cloud companies, much of the world’s workloads still live in private datacenters, and finding ways to manage and connect these two worlds is a huge challenge for companies. You would assume a company like Nutanix would be in demand. In fact, it reports that more than 1,800 customers have spent over $1 million on its services.

But growth at the company has stalled lately. In Q4 fiscal 2022, revenue declined 1% to $385.5 million from $390.7 million a year earlier. The top line was also lower than the preceding quarter, when the company reported $403 million.

The good news is that despite the revenue dip, Nutanix’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) continues to rise — climbing 37% in Q4 2022 from a year earlier. Annual contract value (ACV) was also up 10% in the same period.