The next major launch from trendy infrastructure startup Nutanix Inc. won’t involve any hardware, according to a new report on The Register. Instead, the appliance maker is switching gears and preparing to launch a standalone version of its management stack that can run on third party equipment.

The move continues the trend of administrative functions that were traditionally built directly into the host system moving up the stack, which most recently saw IBM make the functionality from its top-end storage arrays available on other platforms. That shift is a response to growing demand for freedom of choice among traditional organizations hoping to emulate the efficiency of the commoditized architectures powering the world’s largest data centers.

Nutanix has an easier time adapting for the new paradigm than traditional vendors such as Big Blue because it doesn’t have traditional product lines to sustain and, more importantly, already relies on software to set its data center modules apart from the pack. The Virtual Computing Platform aggregates the capacity of storage cards attached to the host servers into a shared pool that can easily scale over time.

The standalone version, which is currently in limited testing with customers and could hit general availability within a few months, will bring that functionality to hardware from other vendors. But that doesn’t mean Nutanix intends to stop shipping appliances and suddenly pivot to a business model revolving entirely around software and support.

Rather, the startup will pitch the upcoming release as a free “community edition” – with a cap on deployment size – aimed at making the capabilities of the platform more accessible for organizations to try out. That could fill an important gap in its strategy.

Nutanix has been steadily working to lower the entry barrier for customers with the addition of cheaper and cheaper models, but even the smallest configurations in its converged appliance series cost tens of thousands of dollars. That’s a lot of capital for an IT department to bet on a platform that it may not end up implementing.

The free version will remove that sticking point and enable CIOs to test Nutanix’s offering without committing a substantial amount of resources to the pilot. That should encourage more organizations to evaluate the platform and thereby increase the number of leads that will potentially turn into paying customers.

Given the cutthroat competition in the converged infrastructure space, there’s a good chance the move will drive competitors to respond and introduce free standalone versions of their own software stacks sometime later down the road. That could open a new front in the segment’s already fierce battle for dominance and add more fuel to the broader industry shift towards software-defined management.

Image via Pixabay