Aug 26, 2026 earnings call — Q4 strong finish driven by platform expansion
Nutanix beat Q4 guidance with revenue of $757 million and ARR of $2.549 billion.
Revenue $0.8B (est $0.7B) · EPS $0.60 (est $0.49) · Next-quarter revenue outlook $0.8B–$0.8B
Key quotes
"We saw strength across our business and are happy to have exceeded all of our guided metrics for the quarter. We saw strong uptake of our external storage offerings and Nutanix Cloud Clusters, or NC2, in the quarter, both of which are helping to mitigate the impact of ongoing supply chain challenges on our customers."
"We delivered Nutanix Agentic AI, a full stack software solution designed to reduce complexity, optimize performance and security, and enable lower and more predictable total costs for agentic AI applications."
"Because of this, we are assuming a moderately higher percentage of orders with future start dates in fiscal year '27 compared to fiscal year '26."
Analyst Q&A 9
FY27 growth assumptions
Q (Matthew Martino · Goldman Sachs): Analyst asked what assumptions underlie the FY'27 growth guide and what gives confidence in that starting point.
A: Management said growth comes from several drivers: strengthening the core hybrid cloud platform, external storage support, cloud native and AI offerings, and partner ecosystem help. They also noted ongoing supply chain challenges and that they will assume more orders with future start dates and phased migrations.
"So that's one of the reasons. We want to continue to provide flexibility with future start dates, and that's why we were assuming a moderately higher percentage of orders with future start dates in '27 compared to '26." — Rukmini Sivaraman (CFO)
Drivers behind revenue guidance
Q (Sanjit Singh · Morgan Stanley): Analyst asked what is driving the sustained growth outlook despite headwinds and whether better bookings this year will convert into revenue next year.
A: Management said they are exiting FY'26 with strong momentum and expect continued bookings growth. They expect external storage and NC2 to grow faster than overall revenue and act as accelerants, and also see cloud native and AI offerings as additional growth drivers.
"So one is, like I said, we're exiting '26 with strong momentum. Q4 was a great quarter across multiple dimensions." — Rukmini Sivaraman (CFO)
Pull-in demand for hardware
Q (James Fish · Piper Sandler): Analyst asked whether there was any net pull-in of demand into Q4 given hardware issues and whether backlog is building.
A: Management said they did not see unusual pull-in activity in Q4; pull-ins had been noted earlier in fiscal Q2 but not in Q3 or Q4. They reiterated the future start date dynamic will continue into FY'27 and said they closed a reasonable number of large multimillion-dollar ACV deals in Q4.
"so the short answer is we did not really see anything unusual in terms of pull-ins in Q4." — Rukmini Sivaraman (CFO)
Supply constraints detail
Q (Joseph Cardoso · JPMorgan): Analyst asked for more pointed detail on supply constraints: lead times, pricing, whether things are worsening or stabilizing, and impact on near-term demand and FY'27 outlook.
A: Management said fiscal '26 saw significant hardware price increases and they expect additional increases in FY'27, though perhaps moderating. Lead times are mixed — some SKUs stabilize, others extend — and they encourage customers to consider the broad set of vendors they support; they expect these supply issues to continue through FY'27.
"I mean -- so we did see significant price increases in fiscal '26 on hardware, big jumps, I would say." — Rajiv Ramaswami (CEO)
Neocloud ChronoScale deal details
Q (Radi Sultan · UBS): Analyst asked what revenue opportunity Nutanix gets from the ChronoScale agreement and whether they can upsell other products beyond AI.
A: Management said the ChronoScale deal is a full-stack deployment: Nutanix Cloud Platform, NKP, and Nutanix Agentic AI. They said revenue is recognized as ChronoScale onboards customers, since ChronoScale is a service provider, and they expect to work with more neoclouds this year.
"Our Nutanix Cloud Platform, our NKP offering and on top of that, the Nutanix Agentic AI portion." — Rajiv Ramaswami (CEO)
Which products will drive growth
Q (Paramveer Singh · Oppenheimer): Analyst asked to rank contributors to growth: HCI/VMware share, NCI compute/external storage, and other portfolio pieces like DB and AI.
A: Management said the bulk of new land-and-expand business will still be HCI. They expect external storage (NCI-C) to be a fast-growing contributor after a strong Q4, and cloud native, AI, and database services to also grow rapidly behind those.
"So the bulk of our new business for this year, the land-and-expand business that we will close will be HCI, right, still, right?" — Rajiv Ramaswami (CEO)
Agentic AI adoption timing
Q (Wamsi Mohan · BofA): Analyst asked whether agentic AI on-prem is at an inflection point and when it might meaningfully scale for Nutanix and the industry.
A: Management said agentic AI is a relatively new portfolio area for them and is growing quickly off a small base as they add capabilities. They believe industry adoption is still very early; some customers will run large AI workloads on-prem or in service providers, but broad scaling is not yet at an inflection point.
"I would say for us -- by the way, it's a relatively new portfolio product area for us, and it's growing quickly off a small base, as we continue to add significant capabilities to the platform over the last 6 months even." — Rajiv Ramaswami (CEO)
Renewals vs supply chain impact
Q (Simran Biswal · RBC): Analyst asked about renewals linearity through the year and visibility given supply chain constraints.
A: Management said renewals are largely insulated from supply chain issues because supply chain affects new deployments that need servers, not renewals. They see nothing unusual in renewals' linearity now and will update if visibility changes; renewals revenue shows up when due.
"So that's the good news on renewals, that those are largely independent and insulated from any kind of supply chain challenges." — Rukmini Sivaraman (CFO)
Future start dates and net new ARR
Q (Michael Cikos · Needham): Analyst asked whether Q4 strength benefited from catch-up of contracts with future start dates converting into revenue, and longer-term impact on available-to-renew from new logos.
A: Management said they did not see a catch-up of future start dates in Q4 and would not attribute outperformance to that. They added that net new ARR was higher partly because billing duration was lower in Q4 and they expect billing duration to be meaningfully higher in Q1, which would lower net new ARR for a given revenue; they also noted ATR will grow but at a slower rate in FY'27.
"I don't think we saw -- well, we didn't see any kind of catch-up in future start date in Q4, Mike, so I wouldn't call that out as a reason for the overall outperformance in Q4." — Rukmini Sivaraman (CFO)