• Martin Veitch, Freelance Journalist & Former Editor at CIO UK


• 08.05.2026 03:00 pm
#EnterpriseIT #CloudInfrastructure

Demand for technology, in case you have been residing under a shady rock for a long period of time, is in another boom cycle. Supply-side demand for AI means that even sizeable organisations and their customers are sometimes being forced to wait in line for hardware, such has been the logjam for memory and GPUs. Whether you see the AI as a bubble comparable to Dutch Tulip Mania or another Industrial Revolution – version 4.0, 5.0… who can count? – real money is being committed in its name. That’s all very well but these are the sorts of go-go times when vendor elbows get even sharper, contracts are delivered over the wall and nobody seems able to even spell ‘customer service’.

We are seeing crops of startups with sky-high valuations and we are observing a desire by tech megacorps to bet the farm on AI. Witness Oracle’s massive layoffs and bold-beyond-words cash raise to stake its future on  AI. But how does the CIO of a financial services organisation stand or fall on such shifting sands?

Tech watchers are used to unpredictability being written through their IT investments like Brighton rock. The scorching-hot startups often burn out and the unicorns are sacrificed. Financial sector people prefer stability and predictability in their suppliers… but they rarely get it. The really scarce beasts today, ironically, aren’t the mythical unicorns which are 10 a penny these days but the steady-as-she-goes merchants with roadmaps to the future, solid balance sheets and a desire to partner with their customers.

I was mulling on all this recently when an example of the opposite of this detrimental culture was right in front of me. In the windy city of Chicago in early April, Nutanix, an influential and innovative but unflashy and rarely hyped developer of enterprise cloud IT solutions, held its annual .Next conference. 

It’s fair to say that Nutanix is swimming against the tide. The company is a still steady presence amid the frothy waters of a technology sector that sometimes appears to be drowning in the typhoons and whirlpools its marketers and spin-doctors have whipped up.

Nutanix hails from Silicon Valley but appears immune to the hamster-wheel of tech trends that finds its epicentre there. The company was founded in 2009 and is therefore a teenager in years or middle-aged by Valley standards. In its early days it created its own stir early by consolidating compute, storage and networking into a box when, all around it, the giants of the sector like IBM, HDS, HP and EMC were peddling servers and storage systems the size of refrigerators, sofas or elevators.  

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, blue-chip tech enterprises dislike an intruder. Usually a company capable of getting under the skin of the industry incumbents will be paid to go away through the systemic M&A threshing machine that has become a persistent item in tech. Somehow, Nutanix has survived as a company that operates solo and it continues to innovate and delight its customers. It has an NPS score that ranks consistently in the 90s. Customers are front and centre of the .Next event where some large organisations still appear to hide them away from the public (and each other) lest they compare licensing Ts and Cs or support experiences.

The .Next event was replete with geeky discussions of AI with a very characteristic combination of engineering chat and polite self-deprectation. The company’s chief AI officer, Debo Dutta, laughs at his own fancy title and likens AI assistants to “digital Minions”. The company’s cerebral CEO Rajiv Ramaswami speaks calmly and insightfully about today and tomorrow. You won’t hear much here about revolutions, existential threats for laggards or, drear phrase, paradigm shifts. When Broadcom acquired VMware and set about effectively jettisoning much of its customer base, many found a home with Nutanix.

As I write, Nutanix has a market cap of under $11.5bn, making it a midsize enterprise player, although it has traded significantly higher. What it retains is a culture of service and engineering excellence. Its customers and prospects will benefit from that focus in a world where strategy can often appear made up on the hoof, saying something appears to make it a reality, and reality itself has become a hallucinogenic illusion.

As a public company there is no guarantee of course that Nutanix stays on its current route. But CIOs will appreciate that not every company exists to serve the masters of Wall Street, act as fast-talking persuaders or appear to have more in common with hucksters and promo men than engineers.