Nutanix files to go public with $200 million IPO

Nutanix, a company selling data center hardware that combine elements of servers and storage arrays, today filed a form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, officially kicking off the process of going public.

The company says it aims to sell a maximum of $200 million in shares in the initial public offering. Shares of its stock will trade on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol NTNX. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Credit Suisse are the lead underwriters of the deal.

Nutanix has long been expected to go public, and now the wheels are officially in motion. It’s not clear when the IPO will be, but given the late date of the year, the company may have been hustling to file before the 2015 IPO window closed.

Based in San Jose, California, and established in 2009, Nutanix registered a net loss of $126 million on $241 million in revenue for the fiscal year that ended on July 31, according to the filing. Over the years, both product and support revenue have gone up, and so have expenditures and losses. In the three months that ended on October 31, revenue came in at $87.7 million, with 35 percent of it coming from international customers.

As of October 31, 1,368 people worked for the company, the filing states.

The filing also shows that Nutanix had 2,100 customers as of October 31. Major customers named in the statement include Toyota Motors of North America and NetSuite. “Nutanix enabled NetSuite to dramatically improve system performance including application speed and webpage load times,” Nutanix says in the filing. “In addition, NetSuite was able to reduce its internal corporate IT datacenter footprint by over 90%. Cost savings were achieved by scaling the Nutanix infrastructure, eliminating overprovisioning and reducing internal corporate IT time commitments significantly.”

Competition comes from a number of directions, including legacy storage vendors EMC, NetApp, and Hitachi Data Systems, according to the filing. VMware, a virtualization software seller that has done an interesting dance with hardware in recent years, is also listed, as are Cisco, HP, IBM, and Lenovo.

And like other enterprise hardware vendors, Nutanix leans on partners. Two partners, Carahsoft Technology Corp. and Promark Technology Inc., brought in 38 percent of revenue for Nutanix’s 2015 fiscal year. Any problems with these partner relationships could potentially lead to trouble for Nutanix in the future.

There is also the relationship with Super Micro, the company that tests and assembles Nutanix’s hardware. Depending on just one company to do that could pose a risk as well.

Nutanix does have more than one original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partner. Today, it works with both Dell and Lenovo in that fashion.

Investors include Blumberg Capital, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Riverwood Capital Partners, and Fidelity.

Dheeraj Pandey, cofounder and CEO of Nutanix and a former executive at Aster Data Systems, received a salary of $232,500 and a bonus of $194,700 for the 2015 fiscal year, excluding stock awards.

Updated at 4:37 p.m. Pacific to correct total revenue for the most recent quarter: the article previously included product revenue, not total revenue.