But private cloud contender sees upside in its modernization mission
Donald Trump's DOGE cost-cutting unit has made it harder to do business with the US federal government, according to private cloud contender Nutanix.
Speaking on the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call, CFO Rukmini Sivaraman said "Some of the personnel changes and additional reviews that we've seen in the U.S. Fed seem to continue and have resulted in longer deal cycles and some increased variability overall in that particular vertical for us."
The Register asked Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami if the Trump administration has changed procurement practices and he said that’s "one hundred percent" the case, and named DOGE as the source of "a lot of people changes and budget cuts" that have made it harder to sell to the Feds. The DOGE cost-cutting unit was was not an official Congress-approved governmental agency, but rather a task force established through an executive order from President Trump, and was informally led by South Africa-to-US immigrant Elon Musk before the two had a public falling out. The group, which was staffed in large part by young and often inexperienced volunteers associated with Musk, was accused of acting quickly and often recklessly, and did not end up delivering anywhere near the originally promised cost cuts.
"It is starting to get a little more stable now," the CEO said, adding that he sees DOGE’s modernization mission as a good thing for Nutanix, as an efficiency drive will mean agencies buy new technology. Ramaswami thinks Nutanix can show federal buyers that it can deliver the improvements DOGE wants.
Nutanix posted $653 million revenue for the quarter, and $2.54 billion for the full year, up 18 percent year-over-year for Q4 and 19 percent compared to FY 2024. The company landed 2,700 new customers during the financial year.
Earlier this year, the company changed its policy of insisting that customers use its software-defined storage and allowed use of external storage arrays. Dell’s PowerFlex is the first external storage array Nutanix supports, and Ramaswami said that the first sales under this arrangement included a pair of global 2000 companies, one in the financial services sector and another in the medical equipment industry.
Nutanix also announced that Finanz Informatik (FI), a German outfit that is the central IT service provider for Germany's Savings Banks Finance Group, which serves around 50 million customers, will migrate its Windows and Linux workloads to the Nutanix platform.
The CEO said that deal, and the Dell wins, show that Nutanix can compete for the large customers Broadcom’s VMware business unit targets, and pry away VMware customers over time.
"I think the vast majority of the [VMware migration] opportunity is still in front of us," Ramaswami said. "If you were to characterize this as a multi-inning baseball game, I'd probably say we're in the second inning at this point. And there's still a lot of customers out there with VMware and it's going to take time in terms of these migrations."
AI will be another slow burn, he predicted.
"Customers are experimenting," he said. "They’re looking for ROI." So is Nutanix, which Ramaswami said has experienced "maybe" a ten precent reduction in the time needed to resolve support requests since creating an AI for that task.
"I would love to see more," the CEO said. ®