Dheeraj Pandey: New Nutanix CEO Needs ‘Infrastructure’ Expertise

“We’ve gotten some great candidates in the pipeline,” said Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey during the company’s fiscal 2021 first quarter earnings report Monday night.

As the search for a new Nutanix CEO is currently underway, CEO and co-founder Dheeraj Pandey said he’d like to see his replacement have expertise in the infrastructure space as well as a solid three-to-five year vision for the company.

“We’ve gotten some great candidates in the pipeline,” said Pandey (pictured) during Nutanix’s fiscal 2021 first quarter financial earnings call with media and analysts Monday. “We definitely would like the relevance of infrastructure to be there. There’s a lot of people out there in the business software space [and] we’re looking at quite a few people in infrastructure as well.”

Pandey said Nutanix’s new CEO ideally would be somebody who has both a short-term and long-term strategy for the company. “Especially for our sales engineers, our developers, our system reliability engineers – there’s a lot of engineering in the company in various different departments that also need to look up to somebody for strategy and the public cloud landscape that is out in front of us,” he said.

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Pandey is set to retire from Nutanix after the San Jose, Calif.-based software star finds and selects a new CEO, which will likely be within the next few months.

For its fiscal 2021 first quarter, which ended Oct. 31, Nutanix generated $312.8 million in total revenue, representing flat sales growth year over year.

The software company reported a 10 percent increase year over year to $138 million in Annual Contract Value (ACV) billings. ACV is the total annualized value of a contract, excluding amounts related to professional services and hardware. Nutanix’s annual ACV run rate climbed to $1.29 billion in the first quarter.

Overall, Nutanix reported a net loss of $265.0 million for its first quarter, compared to a net loss of $229.3 million during the same quarter one year ago. Nutanix captured 680 net-new customers in the first quarter, bringing its global customer base to more than 18,000.

Nutanix stock is up 7 percent in after hours trading to $30.50 per share.

Pandey ended the earnings call by thanking Nutanix customers, channel partners and employees.

“I want to close this earnings call with a ‘thank you’ to everyone who has participated in the journey to get to where we are now,” said Paney. “Our board continues to make progress on the CEO search and we look forward to updating you when we have meaningful news. Personally, it has been the journey of a lifetime to serve our customers and partners, working alongside (our) employees with a future-proof business model, a customer base that fundamentally values reliability, and a technology portfolio that has such a strong product market fit. Our best is yet to come.”