Nutanix IPO Blesses Hyperconverged Data Centers

News Analysis Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading 9/30/2016

Nutanix's early investors and other stakeholders have extra reason to say TGIF, as Wall Street sent the company's IPO bouncing when it debuted Friday.

The Nutanix Inc. IPO popped big, trading at $33.78 on Friday, more than double its starting price of $16.

The IPO was a bit of a rocky road for Nutanix, which initially filed in December, but held off due to a soft market. The company later received an unusual $75 million loan from IPO underwriter Goldman Sachs & Co. Nutanix's initial IPO price was $11 to $13, but on Wednesday it increased the upper range to $15. And then Thursday the company upped the price tag to $16. (See Nutanix Seeks Financial Downpour From Long-Awaited IPO.)

Nutanix, founded in 2009, develops "hyperconverged" technology that combine storage, compute and virtualization in a single fabric of servers, eliminating the need for data center operators to run separate compute and storage networks and hire specialists to run each. Like so many technology trends, hyperconvergence popularity is driven by cloud adoption.

The IPO validates hyperconvergence as a data center technology -- not that it needed that validation, having already been blessed by customers and competitors. Dell Technologies (Nasdaq: DELL), Hewlett Packard Enterprise , Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) and VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) all have their own hyperconverged products, as do startups SimpliVity and Cohesity. Nutanix customers include AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), Best Buy, Toyota Motor Corp., Hyundai and Aflac.

Hey, Nutanix -- go out and have a couple of beers to celebrate. Order expensive microbrews. You can afford it.

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— Mitch Wagner, , Editor, Light Reading Enterprise Cloud