Nutanix To Go Public In 2016, Files S-1 With SEC

Hyperconverged infrastructure player Nutanix, which relentlessly refers to its solutions as ‘web-scale', has filed its S-1 form with the SEC in a precursor to going public early in 2016.
The filing shows revenues of $241 million in the year ending 31 July 2015, up 89.91% from 31 July 2014, and a net loss of $118 million, also up but only 50.15% on the previous year.

Hyper-converged infrastructure brings storage and compute closer together, a markedly different approach to that of Storage Area Networks, or SANs, from the likes of industry stalwarts NetApp, where a single large storage device is connected over a network to multiple compute devices that share the storage between them. In the hyper-converged world, storage lives in the server next to the CPU, and the sharing of resources is done within the server itself, as well as between servers connected over a network.

Workloads are virtualised on the servers using a hypervisor, of which Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor in early 2014, but recently unveiled their own hypervisor called Acropolis, which is based on the open-source KVM hypervisor.

Nutanix has taken in about $312 million in equity funding, according to Crunchbase.com, with their last round of funding in August 2014 of $140 million, which purportedly valued the company at around $2 billion.

Of course, we now get to find out if that figure matches reality.

By my calculations, Nutanix has gross margins of 58.2%, and net income of -52.2% of revenue. For comparison, Pure Storage, which went public in August this year, had gross margins of 55.5% and net income of -105% of revenue based on its S-1 figures.

While the two companies have quite different markets in mind, there is precious little recent data for enterprise technology IPOs because there simply haven't been vary many in the past year or so. It's inevitable that the Nutanix IPO will be compared with the few other IPOs we've seen lately, and given the similar markets (as compared to, say, Square).

In the game of musical chairs that is the tech industry at times, it feels to me like the music is stopping, so if tech companies haven't already started moving towards their preferred chair, they're soon going to find themselves out of the game.

This article first appeared in Forbes.com here.