Last Friday, Storage Newsletter published an article written by Jared Rinderer a senior research analyst at the Equity Capital Research Group stating that Cisco is planning to acquire Nutanix. While the news isn’t officially announced by either Cisco or Nutanix, Rinderer provides an extensive analysis detailing the reasoning behind this expected acquisition.
Nutanix, provider of converged infrastructure, basically a physical server containing both compute and storage driven by an Installed Hypervisor of choice, this server, called a node can be stacked allowing storage to be shared in a single storage pool. Nutanix was founded in 2009 and since then was funded for a total of more than 312 million dollar. The latest funding round was in September last year where Nutanix raised 140 million dollar. Besides Nutanix also SimpliVity and VMware with its EVO:RAIL solution provide similar solutions.
Storage Newsletter explains that Cisco, once working in close collaboration with EMC (the mothercompany of VMware) in the last couple of years lost its position at EMC due to pressure coming from VMware. Since then EMC released competitive products of its own (VSPEX BLEU) and made some acquisitions (like ScaleIO) filling in products which were supplied by Cisco.
The website from Nutanix states that in twenty days from now Nutanix will announce what will be coming next. In 20 days (June 8 -10) Nutanix’s user and partner conference will take place and its expected that the news of this acquisition will be announced then as well.
Update: eWeek reports that Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandy has made a statement to end rumors that Cisco Systems will buy his company. In a statement addressed to the “Dell Team” he states that Nutanix has no plans to go public and that if they decide to do so, Dell will be in the front row seat for bidding for it.
