Nutanix, Inc. (NTNX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today as [ part of ] Needham's Annual Growth Conference. My name is Mike Cikos, and I'm the lead analyst here covering infrastructure software and cybersecurity. I'm pleased to say that we have with us the team from Nutanix with the CFO, Rukmini Sivaraman as well as Head of IR, Rich Valera. Over the next 40 minutes or so, I have a set of questions on my side for a fireside. But if at any point, you guys have questions in the audience, make sure that you send those in via the Q&A or you can e-mail me, I'll do my best to make sure we get to that while we have Rukmini and Rich here. Logistics out of the way Rukmini and Rich, thank you very much for making time for us. We really do appreciate it.

Thanks for having us Mike.

Absolutely. Just to level set, Rukmini, I guess, if you could walk through your background, for the audience as well as just dust off the Nutanix story for folks who may be newer revisiting the thesis here.

Great. Thank you for having us, Mike. It's great to be here with everyone. So quick background. I've been at Nutanix coming up on 9 years. In March, I have been the CFO for almost 4 years of that time, and I've had various different roles at Nutanix before that. And before I joined Nutanix, I was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. To your question, Mike, on maybe an introduction to the Nutanix story. So Nutanix is an infrastructure software company. Of course, Mike covers that world. And so think of us as a software layer that runs on actual hardware infrastructure and helps companies, IT departments manage that infrastructure more efficiently so they can focus on building applications on top of that, which is where most of -- we'd like for them to spend their time and energy. So to give a simple example, like we're now running -- I'm sure many of you run applications within your own organizations, whether it be things like we're running zoom here or it might be a trading application, things like that. And if that's the application layer, those typically run on some infrastructure, meaning you need storage, you need computing, you might need networking, you might need a whole host of infrastructure underneath that. And Nutanix is pioneering innovation, if you will, when we were founded, was to take these silos, if you will, of compute networking and storage and converge them into a new architecture called Hyperconverged Infrastructure. And the benefits to that for customers was simplicity, more effective utilization of those resources and frankly, total cost of ownership savings in the 40% ballpark. And the total cost of ownership includes not just the software, but also the hardware where they could -- they didn't always need expensive large storage areas. They could run our software on fairly simple x86 servers and get all the benefits and allow us to do a lot of the work for them. So think of it as a software-defined infrastructure layer. We got our start on premises, mostly in the data center and sort of created this market. There have been a few entrants over time. And that market continues to grow. And we think that there's still opportunity there in our core motion because the majority of on-prem infrastructure is still in sort of a legacy 3-tier kind of mode. So there's just opportunity for us to introduce, modernize with HCI in that core motion. We also haven't sat still with that -- with the success of the HCI architecture. Over time, we broadened our portfolio to now run that the software innovation that we build anywhere. And by anywhere, we mean it can run on premises, like I said earlier, which was our start, it can today also run on public cloud bare metal, so AWS, Azure, all of those hyperscalers that we're building out. So it can run on those as well. Just the substrate is different. So before, it was a server on data centers, now it can run there and on bare metal for a public cloud. It can also run at the edge locations. So we've broadened that. We've also, over time, broadened our portfolio to run boast virtual machine-based applications and containerized applications, containerized being the more modern way of building applications or workload and including the most modern, maybe have modern applications, which is around AI and so we've kind of broadened our portfolio, Mike, to be what we -- our aspiration, our vision is to be a place where organizations can run any of their applications anywhere and have it be done with great performance, security and with delight. The other thing I'll say, which has differentiated us over time is our customer Net Promoter Score or NPS which has been consistently 90-plus for more than a decade. And I would tell you before I joined Nutanix, I don't know any company that had an NPS anywhere close to that. And it's something we, we really focused on, I think a lot of companies say that customer obsessed, were us, this is how we measure that and 1 way we measure that. And we've kept it at that high level even as we've scaled to now being in a $2.5 billion plus almost $3 billion revenue company. So those are some of the things that I would say differentiate us, and I'm happy to go more, Mike, I'm sure you have questions around the market and competition and all of that.

Well, let's start and thank you for that. Let's start with just Pure HCI market. And obviously, the platform has expanded meaningfully. And you guys are also taking on new solutions. But if I think about underlying demand drivers, when you're engaging with the customer, where are they in their willingness to adopt. You talk about the compelling TCO savings, right? As well as, I guess, if a company says, no, or refutes the HCI, why would that be the case again, just given the demonstrated savings that you're talking to?

Yes. I would say I think a lot of folks where they're not ready, Mike, is often comes down to sort of inertia because it is a new architecture relative to what they might have been used to running for decades, right? Because this compute network storage sort of 3-tier architecture has been around forever. And you have large organizations that I think this audience here will be familiar with that have built out those markets. If you think of storage, you have Dell, you have Pure Storage, you have NetApp, you have all these sort of companies out there that are doing that, same on the compute side where they have big server providers and on the networking side. And so there is some inertia. So sometimes it will be that, which is sort of them understanding and us doing, frankly, a good job of providing references and saying, look, these are all the folks who have now adopted and have seen success with our platform. Let us introduce you to them. So we find that our customers are the strongest marketing for us, if you will, because they can speak directly to why this is a better architecture and why there's little risk to moving to it. So sometimes we'll encounter that where people say, look, I built my own career on fill in the blank, right, like building out these. And so it's a change. And so there's a little bit of that change management. Mike, the other thing we've talked about also is the need, and we've evolved this as well. But historically, we've had a need for a hardware refresh, which I know you know, Mike. But one of the things that I said earlier is that the total cost of ownership savings includes the replacement of sort of potentially a large storage array and more bespoke servers with a very simple x86 server. And so depending on where the customer is in their depreciation cycle for that hardware, they may like the architecture, but they may say, look, not now, I just bought this big box last year, I need to depreciate it. And so sometimes that creates a timing question, which then we will, of course, come back at the time. And the asterisk on that, which is more recently, we've also evolved our approach to support some of those, which was a change for us, but there's been obviously lots of disruption in the market and demand for customers saying, can you support external storage, which we had never done until really last year when we introduced support for Dell PowerFlex first and more recently for Pure Storage. So we're also, I think, working to eliminate that hardware limitation. And it's not an overnight thing, and we'll probably never cover every storage area. But now that we support Pure and we've done Dell PowerFlex, we can -- to a customer who's just purchased Dell PowerFlex, let's say, last year and hasn't appreciated it, we're able to tell them, Oh, we can partner with you today. Let's get going today because we do support that now. So those would be, I think, the few things that we hear when customers are not yet ready and how we are working to accelerate and mitigate that.

A couple of questions on that. But the first, just because we're already talking about the external storage. Can you talk about how those -- I guess, let's start with management's decision because if you guys have been dedicated HCI, why branch out into external storage. I know it's newer for you guys here, but what was the thought process? How do we ensure we don't lose sight of still making sure we're active on that HCI front? And then secondly, what is the status of those partnerships that we have in place? How significant is that when we start thinking about the P&L?

Yes. So it was a significant decision for us, Mike, when we decided to support external storage because up until that point, our whole thesis, if you will, was, look, this is the better architecture. You don't need the 3-tier architecture here as HCI. We still believe that. And I'll tell you what changed in the market and why it made sense for us to go and adopt that. I would say there were -- there was this -- the singular event was sort of Broadcom deciding to acquire VMware, which was announced, I want to say, in 2022, the deal closed in -- at the end of 2023. And what that meant for folks is that I think -- and many people on this call may know this, but Broadcom effectively said that they are not going to sell their stand-alone hypervisor which is what the majority of their customer base was using, just the hypervisor and instead we were sort of really forcing or acquiring people to buy the entire VMware Cloud Foundation stack, which includes HCI, by the way, right? So while we pioneered HCI, VMware was really the only other large company out there in the market offering it. And so now they were out there saying, you cannot just buy the hypervisor, you've got to buy the full -- their VCF stack. Now what that meant for those customers was they were -- like I said, the majority of their customers were using just their hypervisor on a traditional sort of 3-tier environment. And for those folks, it made life quite challenging because that meant they had to go buy this bigger stack. Broadcom also said no more perpetual and perpetual support that is all people were paying. You can now buy a subscription license. So that meant effectively price increases for those customers. And so they were looking for the closest alternative, which is us. And -- but we were also selling our full stack, right, which is sort of comparable to VCF. And we have a hypervisor and had one for more than a decade now called AHV or Acropolis hypervisor, but we sold it as part of our full stack. And so one was that customer demand where folks were saying, look, we'd like to migrate to Nutanix sooner rather than later and not have to wait for this hardware refresh. For that, though, we need to make available AHV++, Think of it as not just AHV, but AHV plus a few other management components to support that. So that was one. The demand environment changed quite meaningfully in terms of folks wanting a more immediate and a really easy solution for them to migrate. The second thing that happened was the -- was a response from the partner community, so these external storage vendors themselves. So you have a Dell PowerFlex, you have a Pure Storage now that we've announced with both where they were more interested, I would say, in partnering with us than in the old world because as you can imagine, in the prior world, we were saying you don't need those storage arrays. You come over to HCI, whereas now they would like to have an alternative where their customers can continue running on those storage arrays while still keeping the rest of their stack going. So there was more motivation, I would say, from companies like that to partner with us. And so we did think long and hard about it, Mike, because we do want to make sure that we are using and giving the customers the right solution for the right situation, meaning that we still think, like I said, HCI is a great architecture. It's more modern. It allows people to port over to where they need to go in the future, whether it be containers or hybrid cloud, et cetera. We also need to meet them where their need is today, right? So our intention with this offering that supports external storage is to gain entry sooner into a customer account than we might have if we didn't have it. But over time, as their hardware depreciates and it's time for -- to revisit the right architecture, our intention is to talk to them about what is that right architecture. Is it HCI? Could we then monetize the full stack for us relative to the smaller portion that we would do with just the external storage piece. So yes, a big decision, but I do think we've also made sure we have those -- that clarity of message to our sellers on how they should think about these opportunities and where to drive the right solution. And look, over time, it will become just another substrate option, like I said earlier, right, where it's like, here's our software stack, whether you run it in a 3-tier or in a server environment, ultimately, we'll meet our customers where they are. So that's the other way to think about it. To your question on impact on P&L, et cetera, I would say it's early days, Mike. So we've had the Dell Power Flex solution. I would say, maybe just over half a year now and Pure Storage, we just announced general availability of that in December. So pretty early days. And the Dell Power Flex platform, the one that we've had for several months now, is one that is fairly concentrated in the sense that it has a small number of large customers. So that we always knew would be sort of take a little bit of time to develop because, again, large customers, small number. Pure's platform is a little more broader adoption than that. So -- and we're looking forward to seeing how that progresses. And then we've also announced another of Dell's platform that's not available yet, but will be soon, which is PowerStore, and that's coming later this year. So early days, but like I said, it does open up more of the market to be addressable by us in the near term.

Maybe just think about PowerFlex just because it has been in the market now for a handful of months here. Great to hear that the demand really seems to have come from both the partners that you're aligning with as well as the market itself. But what has customer feedback been on that front thus far?

Good, really good. We had some -- as part of the early access program, we had some customers who were kind of working with us on that. Some of them have since purchased the solution and are happy with it. So yes, I think it's been good feedback. I think what I want to be clear with PowerFlex, because it's a small number of large customers, it's not like the volume is super high yet, but we knew that. That's -- we knew that going in. And frankly, we had some very specific asks from some of those large customers saying, look, if you had this, we'd be ready to make a purchase. So -- which is great. And that's what -- and we knew that going in. So we'll continue to drive that with more customers going forward.

And then the other thing, too, I know we were talking about a -- if an organization may not be ready to go from a 3-tier architecture to HCI, part of that hurdle might just be the inertia, another part might be the hardware depreciation cycles. And so on the hardware depreciation cycle, I'm sure this will be a common theme throughout the fireside here. But if I think about AI, does that in any way cause organizations to take a broader view of how it's been historically architected or reevaluate what those depreciation cycles have been or not necessarily. That seems to be a little bit more of a stretch versus where we sit today.

Yes. I would say I don't think we've seen a meaningful change on that front, Mike. And I would say enterprise AI in general, I would say, is not kind of mainstream yet. I do think we were in sort of an experimentation phase. Now companies are looking to put more things in production. We have customers out there that are using our enterprise AI solution as well. I don't know if they're fundamentally changing their -- whether it's depreciation cycles, for example, right, to your point on like, Oh, I need GPUs versus whatever -- we haven't seen that happen in any kind of meaningful secular kind of way just yet in our customer base. And I think that's partly because people are also thinking about build versus buy. And we saw in the second half of last year, calendar year alone, 2 sort of conflicting reports, with the MIT report, I think, was saying sort of like, oh, most of these deployments aren't that successful. And then Wharton came out and said, actually, enterprise are having success. So I think to me, that was emblematic of people are still figuring this out, which is what is sustainable here from what workloads, AI workloads do I want to run that will give me some form of ROI measurable or not or whatever it is, and then where do I want to invest. So yes, I think short answer is we haven't seen that in any meaningful trend kind of way. Do we see it occasionally? Yes, but not in a meaningful trend.

Understood. And then I know that the company also has their product, GPT in a box, which has gone through, I think, 2 iterations at this point, at least formal. But with GPT in a box, again, still early days, but how has traction been? What's customer reception when you're going through POCs?

Yes, Rich do you want to -- may be jump in here.

Yeah sure. So the GPT the Box is sort of our full stack plus some incremental capability we added specifically for AI, and that piece is really Nutanix Enterprise AI, which is a piece of our platform that really automates the process of companies trying to sort of build their own agent internally first by downloading the LLM of their choice, fine-tuning it or wagging it on their data. Hooking it up to their application internally and then running inferencing. So that NAI piece helps our customers do that very, very efficiently. And then they can run that on our cloud-native stack, Nutanix Kubernetes platform. So we really enable the customers to, one, transition to potentially cloud-native apps if they were exclusively running traditional VM-based apps before that, run them very efficiently, very -- with all the sort of same governance and data services they have for their VM-based apps and wherever their data resides importantly. That's really one of the strengths of our platform, I think, there's a lot of data gravity typically associated with these enterprise AI applications where they're going to want to run it where the data is, whether that's behind the firewall on-prem, at the edge or in some cases, in the cloud. And we can really let the customer run their AI app wherever that is. That said, in terms of where we are in terms of the take-up, I think Rukmini hit on it well. I think it's still pretty early days, but I think most of our customers, 30,000 or so customers, many of whom are historically just running on VM-based apps. But I think as they look to deploy AI, they're going to want to be able to run cloud-native apps, and we think we're in a great position to help them to do that, and that creates a really nice long-term opportunity for us.

And Rukmini, if I just come back to the most recent quarter, one of the more topical things or discussions we've had with investors is really focused on the dynamic around future start dates, deal sizes, revenue timing. Maybe to just recap how that transpired in the most recent quarter. How you guys took that into account when formulating guidance for the upcoming quarter and rest of the year as well?

Yes. So in our October quarter, which is our fiscal Q1, what we saw was bookings, which is sort of just -- think of it as activity and what our sellers get paid on, came in slightly above our expectations going into the quarter. However, our revenue performance was not what we would have liked. And the reason for that, as Mike, you alluded to, was we saw more of these orders come in with future start dates. And what that means really is it's a noncancelable booking that we get from these customers in most cases. And so -- and they typically pay us multiple years of cash upfront as well. However, they are asking for some flexibility around when their licenses get provisioned. So what that means is, again, it's a noncancelable order. In most cases, we're getting the cash upfront, but the revenue -- timing of revenue around that gets moved from our fiscal Q1 into future periods. So it was a timing of revenue that transpired. Now in terms of what happens, why does that -- why do customers even want this future start date? I would say a lot of it is when we think about customers migrating over from Broadcom onto the Nutanix platform, especially in some of the larger customers, that can take time, meaning it's not done over a quarter. We've given examples in the past where for a large financial institution that was based in the U.S., it took them a year to fully complete the migration. And so in those instances, customers can say, can you give me these licenses not all at once that I purchased and I've committed to Nutanix to, give it to me over time. Think of it as sort of a basically ramped structure where they may say, give me a few right away, some maybe next quarter and maybe the rest a quarter from then, 2 quarters from now. So that then means that our revenue is aligned with when we provision those licenses to the customer, because that's our revenue obligation. And that's what we mean by deals with future start dates. The other scenario we've seen sometimes is when the customer says, I'm ready to commit to Nutanix, I want to go with you all. My hardware isn't coming until whatever end months out. So I want to time the license to be in tune with that. So that's why we see some of these, Mike, like look, we want to do more Broadcom migrations. We view that as a good transaction. It's a good deal that we should take off the street. And so like I said, it's a commitment that the customer is making. It's noncancelable, et cetera. So we want to do that kind of structure. And we saw more of that, I think, towards the tail end of our fiscal Q1 in October than we had previously expected. Now to the second part of your question on what that means for the current quarter, Q2 and the rest of the year, we did take down our full year guide, I think, as folks saw. And the reason for that was, one, we expect this feature start date dynamic to continue because we are going to do more migrations, right? We want our sellers to be seeking out and doing those migrations. Two, we also said that we expect our mix from our OEM partners to grow. And that's, again, generally as a business trend, it's a good thing because they are selling on our behalf. So these are the likes of your Cisco, Dell, Lenovo, et cetera. It does create an incremental, again, a revenue timing delay potentially because we recognize revenue when they've told us that they've shipped their server and then we provision licenses to the customer. So that was the second thing we called out for the full year, Mike. And then the third dynamic we called out for the full year was around supply chain, potential supply chain issues. We hadn't seen that to be clear, in the October quarter, but we were hearing enough about it anecdotally that we -- and we were only -- we had just finished our Q1, we still had 3 more quarters to go. We thought it was important to factor in some of that risk into our full year guide as well. So those were the 3 things we factored in. The other thing I'll say on that last one on supply chain because we do get questions on that one as well is, of course, we're a software company. So we don't have direct visibility into hardware or server lead times and things like that. But right now, I think folks widely understand this industry-wide tightness around memory, DRAM, NAND supply, I think, has been well documented. We've also heard some tightness with CPUs. It's still too early to draw conclusions about how the broader server lead time dynamic may evolve. And of course, we're monitoring that pretty quickly and pretty closely. The other thing I will say is around -- the other dynamic here, if you will, is around server prices increasing as a result of the supply tightening, right? So we believe a lot of this is occurring because all of the folks building out massive infrastructure, the hyperscalers, of course, are sucking up a lot of the supply in the market. And so it's leading to 2 things really. One is tightening supply, which I just talked about. And then two, the potential for higher server prices. And so we've heard about the sharp increases in memory price, and it sounds like most server vendors are planning to raise their prices on servers to pass through those price increases. And what we will say is in terms of what we can control, right, we've taken many actions to offer customers, for example, choice of server vendors, so they can run our software wherever they feel they can get the best price across servers. We're now supporting external storage, which we talked about extensively earlier. We've also enabled our platform now to run public cloud to the extent that, that helps the customer mitigate the potential impact of these higher server prices. So all that said, I think it's too early on this for us to know how this might play out or how it might impact us. But I did want to qualify that last piece a little more given what we've seen in the last few months.

Thank you for calling it out. If I could just come back to the future start dates, element. It feels like that now we're talking about multiple pieces here, but it feels like that's probably the largest piece when thinking about impact on the revenue guide for the full year. And I just wanted to get a sense, one, it sounds like, Hey, what we saw in Q1 is expected to continue through the rest of the year, potentially become more of a factor through the rest of the year. And like is that a fair assumption? And then secondly, is there any expectation for -- like do you have lost visibility because we don't necessarily know when these future start dates are? Like what are customers communicating to you if they do want a future start date, "Hey, we know not today, but maybe September is going to be go live versus -- we don't know, but sometime in the next 12 months".

It's a great question, and I'm glad you asked it, Mike, because when I said earlier that it's -- even orders with future start dates are noncancelable, et cetera, the vast majority of them are also coming with a schedule of the delivery dates, provisioning dates that are in the contract in most cases. So meaning it's contractually agreed upon. And so we do have visibility into that revenue schedule when the order gets booked. There is a smaller portion where it's more like what you described, where they will say, look, I know I want to make a commitment, and I have a rough idea of when it's going to happen, and it might -- but it might change. Even then we get a schedule from customers. And more often than not, actually, they stick to it, right? Because we have now -- this phenomenon itself is not new. We have been -- we've seen future start dates in the past as well. It was more the magnitude of it that was unexpected in October. So yes, the vast majority of the cases, we get the booking, it's noncancelable, and we also get the schedule of when the customer expects to get how many licenses provisioned. And so that is effectively becomes our revenue schedule over that period of time.

And from where we were in the fiscal Q1 is the expectation that the volume of these deals with future start dates, kind of builds throughout the rest of the year. So as like a ramping up a bit .

Sorry, I missed answering the question. So we did say it continues through the rest of the year, Mike. And I don't want to get too granular about does it grow as a proportion or not, but we think it will be more or less in that magnitude going forward, because, again, this is -- to the extent customers want to do migrations and things like that, we want to help them do those and do them in a way that's sustainable for them. And if it's purely a timing thing for us, then we'll work with them on those. I will also say, of course, that the key here is that we offer or agree to this future start date structure where it's needed and not do it where it's not to sort of maybe state the obvious. And so we are also making sure that we have the appropriate sort of managerial controls and approvals and things like that to make sure that it's being offered where it's a qualified opportunity, where there's a real customer need for it, et cetera, right? So that is something we'll continue to do going forward as well so that we're balancing this customer need where it's needed, getting that order off the street while making sure we don't offer it where maybe it's not a structure that's relevant for that customer or not needed and that the reps understand that, that they know where to use it.

And can you help us think about or qualifying any capacity, these have future start dates. So how is that impacting your financials today from -- I think about like an ARR or RPO. Again, you talked about these being noncancelable billings, but where should we expect that to show up or when would it show up?

Yes. So ARR treatment is very similar to revenue, Mike, in that -- so in the example I gave, let's say, this customer has purchased, let's take some round numbers, 1,000 licenses and they say, look, I want only 250 today, give me 250 next quarter and the remaining 500, 2 quarters from now. So we would take revenue for the first 250 million today and so on, right, as those licenses get deployed. ARR is similar and that it's the annualized value of those 250 licenses would show up in ARR in this quarter and then 250 gets added on and so on, right? So ARR and revenue have a similar timing in terms of when those licenses are deployed. And this will be an RPO. So whatever is not recognized in the current period, does go into RPO, because, again, it's a confirmed booking, and we know that it is going to convert into revenue in the future. And then the CRPO portion will be depending on the schedule again, right? So like I said, in most cases, we have the schedule. So we know how much of that is going to be in the next 12 months, which, by the way, the vast majority of those bookings do convert into revenue in the next 12 months. Very rarely is there a tail beyond that. They can be if it's a really large migration or something like that. But generally, next 12 months, most of that converts to revenue.

And then another element to talk to here is the what you guys call available to a new pool, new logos is also a big focus for the firm here. So how is it your balancing resources to support that renewal effort, which is been absolutely great for you guys over the past couple of years now as far as building up the free cash flow profile of the business, while again ensuring that you are acquiring new logos at a healthy pace.

Right. So all of the above is important, Mike, is to your point. And I would say renewals is actually a separate team. So we have a separate renewals team that is inside sellers. So they're not out on the field. So they're inside executives, if you will, inside account executives who are working on the renewals. Now not to say that the field sellers don't spend any time on the renewal because often, you want to make sure that the sales rep who covers the account and the renewals rep are actually closely aligned, because there might be an expansion opportunity that is ongoing, for example, or we might have not an expansion opportunity during the course of the conversation about the renewal. So they are closely aligned, Mike, but it's -- there is a separate renewals team, which spends the bulk of their time -- all of their time really focused on renewals. And then for the field seller, they are primarily compensated on land and expand. so incremental dollars. They do -- they are -- they have some incentive on renewal because, again, we want to make sure they're coordinated and that they have an overall view, especially with existing accounts, right, because you want to be -- you want to present a unified face to existing customers. So we have -- they have a little bit of focus on renewals, but the majority of their compensation and variable compensation is tied to land and expand. So pretty clear in terms of where we want each team to spend the bulk of their time. And to your point on new logos, so then for the reps, they usually have a mix of existing accounts that they're looking to nurture and grow, and they'll have some white space where they have to go and convert them into new logos. So you're right. Look, adding new logos continues to be an important priority for us because we think there's a lot of market out there for us to go and tap into. So we do want to make sure that our sellers do, do that hard work. So they also get a little bit -- paid a little bit more if they convert a new logo, for example, because it is more work, right, to go and get a new logo in relative to getting an existing customer who hopefully is really happy with us to buy more, not to say that that's not work. They're both involved effort, but it's -- understandably, it's harder to go convert a new logo account. So they do get paid a little bit more on that front as well. So you're right. It is a -- we continue to sort of monitor how that's going, how people are spending their time. And if we need to -- every year, we look at sales compensation and see if any tweaks are needed. But that's -- you're right, those are the priorities, and we try to demarket between the field sellers and the renewals team, so they know where their primary focus is.

Great. And probably the last one we'll have time here before we have to wrap -- if I think about the -- well, first, congratulations, we obviously saw the announcement regarding the accelerated share repurchase. But you guys have a very healthy balance sheet here 2 quarter, but for the ASR, can you help us think through the why now? And then secondly, more generally, how you think about capital allocation just given that cash on the sheet?

Yes, for sure. So I would say, look, our October quarter, Mike, you addressed this, didn't go as we'd expect it to from a revenue perspective. And we -- I would like to think we've had a long history of sort of telling you what we're going to do and sort of beating that and then raising -- continuing to raise expectations going forward. And we did not beat in October, right? And so -- and we've sort of tried to articulate kind of what happened within the business and what it means going forward and so on. But that led to sort of the dislocation, I think, in the stock price that we saw. We, of course, believe in the long-term future of the company and everything else. And we've had a nice share buyback program, which we've been repurchasing for many quarters now, and folks can see what that pace has been. But look, like you said, we do have a robust balance sheet, and we thought it was a good opportunity for us to be out there buying shares in the market. And so that's what we did with the ASR back in December. Now to your broader question on capital allocation, I would say, look, there's a few things we can do, of course, with cash as any company. We can pay down debt. We can do things like we did here on continuing our share buyback program and return capital to investors or we can do acquisitions. And I would say that, look, we have, I think, 2 outstanding convertibles on our balance sheet, and we will look to continue to sort of retain optionality on those as it makes sense. We have flexibility in how we pay those down at maturity. So the first of those matures in fall of 2027. And so we'll continue to monitor what makes sense there economically for us to do, but we have optionality to settle it in cash or shares or a mix thereof. And then look, we'll continue our buybacks, right? So we view the ASR as incremental to our existing program because we thought it was important for us to be able to buy shares in the market at those levels. And so we'll continue the share buyback program, Mike. And then on the acquisition front, we continue to be on the lookout, as I think any company should for interesting assets in the market that can augment our existing sort of strategy and maybe help us accelerate our road map, things like that. So we had acquired this company called D2iQ maybe almost 2 years ago now that really allowed us, by the way, great technology. It allowed us to accelerate our cloud-native efforts, right? So our Nutanix Kubernetes platform or NKP really has its seeds in that acquisition. And we had some capabilities. We were able to combine it with theirs and accelerate our road map and get that solution very quickly to market. So things like that will continue to be on the -- on the lookout for as ways for us to tuck in acquisitions that really are accretive to the overall road map and to the overall go-to-market.

All right. Awesome. Thank you so much. I know we're out of time with that, but thank you for the participation here and thank you to the audience for joining. Thank you.

Thank you so much, everybody. .

Thanks for having us Mike.

Thank you Mike.