Nutanix has announced a $101M Series D funding and has surpassed $100M of lifetime booking (in the eight quarters). These are both significant signs of customer traction and potential for growth. Nutanix’s engineering DNA is from companies like Google and Facebook and its virtual computing platform brings hyperscale design principles to the enterprise.

While the overall revenue of the company is small when compared to converged infrastructure numbers from VCE (industry estimates of over $1B in 2013) and Oracle, Nutanix now has more than a dozen million dollar accounts. The new infusion of cash will allow Nutanix to expand its sales and support for a global customer base.

Growth is certainly an important component of Nutanix’s outlook after multiple funding rounds, strategic partners and its participation in a robust ecosystem.  But there are still a couple of questions looming, as it relates to Nutanix’s ability to sustain its platform delivery objectives, and whether or not there’s a chance it could be acquired and assimilated into another entity. Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman has shared his thoughts on Nutanix’s next steps:

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• Is Nutanix’s core value proposition sustainable?

“Nutanix’s virtual computing platform is built on highly scalable software that can deliver performance and functionality. Nutanix’s offering fits well into Wikibon’s Server SAN definition, which we believe is poised to be disruptive to traditional infrastructure over the next five years.

“Last year Nutanix expanded its portfolio to include a variety of configurations. Wikibon would like to see Nutanix push deeper into more application environments, as today VDI makes up a majority of deployments. Full support of Hyper-V deployments is now generally available, which should help expand Nutanix expand its use cases.”

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• Should Nutanix be an acquisition target?

“At only a $1B valuation, Nutanix could be attractive to a company that wants to disrupt the data center infrastructure market,” Miniman goes on. “Since all of the value is in software, it is possible that Dell or Oracle could consider such a move. It would take a very attractive offer since all indications are that CEO Dheeraj Pandey and the management of Nutanix are building the company to remain stand-alone and could potentially position for an IPO by 2015.”