Nutanix Inc. released its earnings on Tuesday, reporting revenue of $313 million for the quarter, an increase year-over-year. The financial progress of the nine-year-old hyperconverged infrastructure company offered some validation that its portfolio was reaching a wider market in the enterprise world.

“The information technology operation can now say ‘yes’ to the business and focus on things that add value,” said Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the .NEXT Conference in London. “First I want to modernize my platform, and then I can do things like modernize my applications, modernize all my operations around that. It is a catalyst to help customers along their way for digital transformation.”

Miniman was joined by guest host Joep Piscaer (@jpiscaer), technical pathfinder, cloud and infrastructure at Jumbo Supermarkten and blogger at VirtualLifestyle.nl, and they discussed Nutanix’s continued growth, customer interest in a hyperconverged model, and the need for a clearly defined hybrid strategy. (* Disclosure below.)

Big company with a deep portfolio

The company also added 1,000 customers, raising its total base over the 10,000 mark for 2018. “This isn’t a startup anymore,” Piscaer said. “This is a big company with a portfolio that’s becoming very broad, very deep. I haven’t seen a company grow that fast in a long time.”

The promise of the HCI is to provide a capability to integrate public cloud and on-premises data centers into a seamless enterprise platform. This can lead to better utilization of resources, an opportunity that appears to be giving Nutanix traction.

“It’s become so much more than just simplification; it’s become a story of freeing up time from the IT operations personnel to do other stuff,” Piscaer observed. “Infrastructure used to be hard. Now it’s really so easy, it’s become a commodity.”

Despite the momentum surrounding Nutanix and the HCI space, there is still a feeling among analysts that the company needs to do more in defining its hybrid cloud strategy.

“The hybrid/multicloud world looks like where we’ll be for the next five to 10 years at least,” Miniman said. “Other than Kubernetes and how that fits into the cloud-native discussion, I haven’t heard a good cohesive message as to how Nutanix does hybrid.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the .NEXT Conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the .NEXT Conference. Neither Nutanix Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Stu Miniman