With on-premises infrastructure losing more ground to cloud every day, the “cloud washing” on the rise at on-prem vendors is not surprising. Is it all clever marketing to save their necks? Or are some of them selling bona fide private cloud?

One company in this category is Nutanix Inc. A rare on-prem bird, it’s growing at about 65 percent a year and is on track to hit $1 billion in revenue before this year is up. A specialist in hyperconverged infrastructure, Nutanix today unveiled a landmark partnership with Google Inc. in its efforts to expand cloud capabilities.

“When they first launched themselves as an ‘enterprise cloud’ as their marketing, everybody was like, ‘What are you talking about? They’re an HCI [Hyperconverged Infrastructure] player,'” said Stu Miniman (@stu) (pictured, right), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio.

During today’s Nutanix .NEXT event in Washington, D.C., Miniman and his co-host Dave Vellante (@dvellante) (left) discussed Nutanix’s curious, yet profitable, market niche.

“Why should Nutanix be more than just an infrastructure piece?” asked Miniman.

Hyperconverged infrastructure is suitable for what the Wikibon.com research team have called “true private cloud,” Vellante pointed out.

However, this view is not uncontested. “There was a blog post today, from Yaron Haviv at iguazio Systems LTD saying, ‘You guys need to rethink your definition of true private cloud because the on-prem guys have no chance against the cloud guys,'” Vellante said of the industry commentary laid out by iguazio’s chief technology officer.

Most enterprises, however, are interested in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, and Nutanix is making interesting moves in those markets, Miniman and Vellante agreed.

Containers to carry Nutanix to cloud?

“Things like Kubernetes [container orchestration management] are really helping with that explosion of that discussion of multi-cloud,” Miniman said of Google’s open-source efforts in cloud-ready data management.

Nutanix today announced a partnership with Google geared toward moving distributed applications among environments with Kubernetes and containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications).

Nutanix should be able to leverage this for extra cred in the multi-cloud market, according to Miniman.

Competition remains stiff, however. “There are lots and lots of players — not only the infrastructure players; lots of software companies and the cloud companies,” Miniman stated.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT US 2017 event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE