Nutanix said it is gaining traction in the UK public sector following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.
Increased licensing costs, the shift to subscription-based models, and the bundling of certain products have created uncertainty among some VMware customers, leading them to seek out alternatives.
“Customers are concerned about increasing costs, reduced support, and uncertain product roadmaps,” said Andrew Puddephatt, Nutanix’s UK public sector director. “Broadcom hasn’t hidden that they’re primarily interested in their top 2,000 customers worldwide, which excludes most UK public sector organisations.”
To mitigate migration challenges, Nutanix last year introduced an offer whereby organisations committing to a three-year contract receive 12 months of free licensing. As a result, Mid Cheshire NHS Trust completed a full migration in just six weeks, projecting £85,000 annual savings to be redirected into patient care. Lancashire County Council moved 95 percent of its estate to Nutanix, migrating 900 virtual machines in three months using Nutanix’s free migration tool.
Elsewhere, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)’s pre-Covid hosting budget was £169 million. Next year, it’s projected to be £65 million – a transformation partially enabled by running on-premise hosting on Nutanix.
“We’re infrastructure agnostic,” said Puddephatt. “We help customers run workloads wherever makes sense – on-premise, in crown hosting, or across hyperscalers like AWS, Azure, or GCP. Our licences are flexible, giving customers maximum management capabilities.”
This flexibility is crucial as government embraces a “cloud appropriate” strategy, added Puddephatt.
Nutanix has grown from having 40 public sector customers to about 180 across central government, defence, national security, NHS, local authorities, and higher education “Our growth is fundamentally about making things simpler for public sector entities to deliver citizen and patient services.”
Cost savings from shift to hyperconvergence
With public sector facing significant restructuring – including potential reductions in NHS England’s administrative roles and local authority consolidations – a standardised IT strategy is essential, said Puddephatt.
“Organisational changes need a consistent, standardised IT approach. Working across different NHS trusts and local authorities, each doing their own thing, is not a simple task.”
However, Nutanix is also positioning itself strategically in the emerging AI landscape. While not an AI application vendor, they provide infrastructure to securely manage large language models, addressing data sovereignty and security concerns critical to public sector deployments.
“We typically see 30-50 percent cost savings over three to five years when organisations move from traditional three-tier architectures,” said Puddephatt. “That means resources can be redeployed into exciting projects like AI and core service delivery.”
