Large IT players have the advantage that their own solutions can also be useful to them. During Nutanix .NEXT 2025, we heard from Chief Information Officer Rami Mazid about how his company uses the Nutanix platform as ‘customer zero’.
More information about Nutanix .NEXT 2025 can be found in Techzine’s previous articles. These include the announcement of a partnership with Pure Storage, the renewal of Nutanix Enterprise AI, and the release of a hypervisor-less Cloud Native AOS.
Mazid has been CIO at Nutanix for two years, with previous roles at Deloitte, Cisco, and eBay, among others. The main reason for choosing Nutanix as his next employer was the effort that complex IT environments had cost him for almost three decades. That complexity was the biggest stumbling block in the attempt to make optimal use of the available IT resources. Nutanix’s goal is precisely this optimization and, at the same time, simplification of this infrastructure. In short, working at Nutanix was a “dream,” as he told us last year at .NEXT 2024. Back then, we already heard some things about the company’s own use of the Nutanix platform, which we are now exploring in more depth. Some of what we’ve included originates from last year, including some of the stats on Nutanix’s infrastructure.
Mazid himself was never a Nutanix customer at Cisco or eBay. In the former case, this is quite easily explained: he left that company in early 2014, when Nutanix was still in its infancy. At eBay, the on-prem environment was built on decades of legacy when Mazid arrived in 2015. Until his last year at the e-commerce giant (2023), Nutanix did not emerge as an option. Nowadays, it’s likely to appear on CIOs’ radar far quicker.
Nutanix on Nutanix
Nutanix’s own deployment is “one of our major strategic initiatives,” according to Mazid, summarized as “Nutanix on Nutanix” (inside Cisco, this was similarly called “Cisco on Cisco”). An internal cross-functional team meets twice a month and communicates extensively with the product division, R&D, support, and other services. The company’s own “fairly large” IT environment is naturally considered an early adopter and a challenging use case, where new solutions are immediately put through their paces. It also influences the roadmap. The rollout of Nutanix inside Nutanix takes place both via the three hyperscalers and inside its seven data centers globally, according to Mazid.
Last year, we already heard that Nutanix deployed around 28,000 nodes, 7,500 blocks (consisting of 1-4 nodes), 152 clusters, 21,000 static VMs, and 50-100,000 dynamic VMs. About half of the static VMs run on one of the public clouds. This allows the company not only to simulate the actual functionality of its own platform for hybrid multicloud customers, but also to experience first hand how the platform operates at scale. All this is managed from a single interface, the clichéd but highly coveted ‘single pane of glass’, because “otherwise I would need an army to manage [the IT environment],” says Mazid. Around 110 employees are responsible for keeping Nutanix’s own infrastructure, network, daily operations, end-user services, and more up and running. “If I wasn’t on Nutanix, I would need 200 people to run that many VMs and such a large IT environment.”
This all sounds reasonable. We have often heard that vendors are “one of their most critical customers,” “customer zero,” or something similar. Still, some additional details about Nutanix’s own use are useful to better understand the company’s perspective. Mazid notes that in its early days, Nutanix underwent a VMware exodus, just like its later customers. Admittedly, this did not happen under Broadcom’s forced price increases that would come later, but the nature of VM migrations has not fundamentally changed from a technical perspective.
When it comes to cloud providers, there were also significant savings to be made after Mazid joined the company. Within a year (2023-2024), AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud bills were reduced by $2.8-3 million. The big advantage is that these cost savings mean Mazid does not have to ask the CFO for additional investment funds, he says.
Different requirements
Other facts mentioned by Mazid: 68 percent of Nutanix’s own environment is on-premises, 27 percent is in the public cloud, and the remaining 5 percent is at the edge. The company itself is very active in North America, Asia, and Europe. The latter is the most difficult region to achieve compliance needs, says the Nutanix CIO, which is not entirely surprising. The company’s own solution helps enormously to simplify the management of this complex global IT environment. Otherwise, Mazid notes, one would have to develop two different skill sets for on-premises and the cloud, respectively.
That is why some Nutanix solutions are useful for its own deployment. Innovations announced at .NEXT 2025 immediately spring to mind, such as the updated Nutanix Enterprise AI with shared LLM endpoints for faster agentic AI deployment.
This also includes a proprietary “AI farm” where Nutanix’s AI initiatives are explored. Nutanix uses AI for customer service, sales, and Federated Search. The former manifests itself as an AI tool for independent help via the backend. This has reduced the number of open tickets from tens of thousands to thousands. This saves a lot of time, as most of the problems are fairly simple in nature, such as a forgotten password. It also handles things like provisioning based on the user’s profile. This AI tool can be contacted via Slack and is also connected to ServiceNow. Federated Search, which was introduced in the spring of 2023 based on Nutanix Objects (within Nutanix Unified Storage), enables the use of a global namespace for multiple Nutanix object stores. This allows Nutanix staff to find the right data with minimal friction, regardless of where it is located.
The bottom line is an internal Net Promoter Score of 92 percent, according to Mazid. “Our First Contact Resolution (FCR) rating for internal service requests is 98 percent.” In other words, almost all IT issues that require assistance from Nutanix engineers are handled correctly the first time. The global average is 70 percent. According to Mazid, Nutanix IT staff are quite demanding, which is quite logical given the technical nature of the company.
Finally, Mazid summarizes the role he envisions for the IT department under the CIO, both within Nutanix itself and across the industry. Because these departments are challenged every year with shrinking budgets, he believes that CIOs and IT decision-makers need to be as innovative as possible to get the most out of every dollar invested, including the tools they develop themselves. “You’d be amazed at how quickly you can achieve optimization by doing that.”