Nutanix Expands Operations to Australia With Official Launch in Sydney

SYDNEY, Australia, June 6, 2013 – Nutanix, the leading provider of hyper-efficient, massively scalable and elegantly simple data centre infrastructure solutions, today announced it has expanded its operations in Asia Pacific with the launch of its first Australian office in Sydney. The new Australian operation is part of a global expansion in which Nutanix has opened more than seven new offices worldwide in the past 12 months and grown to an annualised run rate of more than US$80 million in just six quarters.

Nutanix has also chosen Melbourne as the location for its Asia Pacific Support Centre, which will provide technical support for the company’s customers, partners and resellers throughout the entire region. Countrywide operations will be based in Sydney, serviced by Australia-based Nutanix personnel and local resellers.

As part of the company’s growing reach, it has already established partnerships with more than 12 resellers throughout Australia and New Zealand to help companies create the infrastructure needed to support adoption of virtualisation and, in particular, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) projects, across the region. Nutanix is also working in a number of vertical markets in Australia and New Zealand including professional services, healthcare, education, retail and government. The company counts organisations such as the Australian Rugby Union, Pearson Research and Assessment, Sanity Music, and the Taranaki District and Southland Regional Councils, among its customers.

Nutanix’s growth in Australia and worldwide is due to a surge in growth and demand for converged infrastructure solutions combining compute and storage in a single appliance. Research firm IDC estimates that total worldwide spending for converged infrastructure will reach US$17.8 billion by 2016, up from an estimated US$4.6 billion during 2012. Accordingly, the firm estimates that converged infrastructure will make up 12.8 percent of the total storage, server and networking and software spend by 2016, up from only 3.9 percent in 2012.[1]

“The high adoption of virtualised infrastructures and the growing demand for centralised data storage by Australian and New Zealand organisations is driving this rapid take-up of our converged solution,” said Vignesh Shashidhar, Northern Region Territory Account Manger, Australia, Nutanix. “In addition to addressing customers’ compliance and security concerns, we can also help them rapidly deploy new compute and storage infrastructure to meet the ever-increasing demand for secure access to information that is stored centrally.

“Our Melbourne Support Centre will also provide the support and scale required for any kind of virtual infrastructure organisations need throughout the Asia Pacific region,” Shashidar added.

Technology Drivers

Australia is one of the leading markets for virtualisation projects worldwide. CIOs throughout the region are currently being challenged by a work skills deficit, making it difficult to build and maintain data centres at the level they require as well as reduce complexity and costs within those centres. Nutanix is well-positioned to serve the needs of enterprises looking to solve a variety of data centre problems, whether supporting a virtualisation deployment, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or removing the need to invest in costly hardware to support data needs. The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform is an award-winning solution that converges compute and storage in a single appliance, without the need for SAN-based storage. Using a software-defined approach, companies can centralise their approach to both compute and storage and take advantage of commodity hardware to scale their operations as needed.

Jean-Manuel Becker, Director of IT Systems, of Melbourne-based Pearson Research and Assessment is using Nutanix to help scale the company’s ever-changing data centre workloads on demand.

“We use the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform to build portable data centres to provide testing and education services in Asia and the Middle East. Education testing is very seasonal and needs scalable infrastructure with online high performance. With the Nutanix 2U block, we can bring a full data centre to a testing/grading centre in-country that helps us to deliver exam results and educational outcomes faster. We have been very impressed with Nutanix’s technology and are delighted to be working with such an innovative company,” said Becker.

The Australian Rugby Union has also employed Nutanix as part of a disaster recovery project.

“Nutanix gave our business the reassurance that we had the right infrastructure in place to provide critical continuity in case we experienced an outage as we moved from one data centre to another,” said Nick Payne, Infrastructure Manager, Australian Rugby Union. “It provided a solution to cover any shortfall within our capacity for compute and storage to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster.

“Also we were pleasantly surprised by the amount of compute and storage available on such a small footprint in the converged Nutanix appliance.”

Payne said the modular, scalable approach taken by Nutanix was the right way to go for data centres as enterprises adopt a hybrid cloud strategy.

“While more and more IT will move into the cloud at the moment there is still certain infrastructure that is not appropriate for the cloud and should remain on-premise – that is where the converged appliances fill the gap,” he said.

Both the Pearson and ARU implementations were sold through Nutanix partner, BEarena.

“We focus on technology solutions that deliver true business benefits,” said Darren Ashley, Managing Director, BEarena Pty Ltd. “We were convinced technology was emerging that would drive change in the way customers virtualised, we researched the market in early 2012 and found Nutanix to be most closely aligned to our view of the future state. Virtualisation 2.0 is upon us, and Nutanix has not only been able to deliver real value to our customer base over the past 12 months in our numerous deployments, the company has delivered real benefits to BEarena in the way it has partnered with us. We work with our customers as a virtual IT team, as part of their organisation, and we expect to know their infrastructure as well as they do. Nutanix has fit perfectly into that approach, extending the virtual team from customer to vendor.”

Global Growth

In addition to Nutanix’s rapidly expanding footprint throughout Australia, the company recently announced significant momentum worldwide with 80 per cent quarter-over-quarter growth over a period of six quarters.  The company has also added more than 100 employees worldwide over the past year.

About Nutanix

Nutanix provides data centre infrastructure solutions that are hyper-efficient, massively scalable and elegantly simple. The award-winning Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform has disrupted the market by seamlessly and natively converging compute and storage in a single appliance. Headquartered in San Jose, Calif. with offices and authorised solution providers throughout the world, Nutanix is privately held and backed by top-tier VC firms. For more information, visit www.nutanix.com.

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[1] IDC Report, “Worldwide Converged Systems 2012-2016 Forecast: Adoption Fueled by Faster Time-to-Market Demands”, Nov. 2012, Doc. #237979.