Four days ago, Dheeraj Pandey, who has led Nutanix from founding to $1.6B in annual billings has announced a succession plan. “There is no better time for a new leader to guide Nutanix through its next decade of growth and success”, said Pandey.
11 Years ago, Dheeraj was one of the three founders of the Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure (‘HCI’) platform. In that period, Nutanix grew from nothing towards becoming the current leader in the HCI market leaving its’ competitors such as VMware and Microsoft behind. During the last few years, Nutanix positioned itself as a software company and developed new products to extend the Nutanix HCI solution becoming a Nutanix Enterprise Cloud platform. That Enterprise Cloud platform enables Hybrid- and Multi-Cloud solutions making the underlying physical infrastructure invisible.
In the past months, the global COVID-19 lockdown policies forced almost 100% of Nutanix employees to work from home including Pandey. “While I will miss being in the trenches with our team every day, working from home alongside my family over the last several months has been a fulfilling experience. I look forward to spending more time with our children and allowing myself the space and flexibility to read and write, and learn new domains, which simply hasn’t been possible as a full-time CEO.”
In October 2019, I had the chance to meet Dheeraj during the annual Nutanix .NEXT event held in Copenhagen, Denmark. Even though our “meeting” consisting only out of taking a quick selfie it did confirm that he is a very approachable and down to earth person. Even more so because his name tag stated “Employee” instead of something else like “CEO”.
I wish Dheeraj all the best and want to take this opportunity to say “Thank you for inspiring me to reach greater heights!”.