Great. Thank you to everyone for joining us at the end of a nice long day as part of our annual Needham Growth Conference. I'm pleased we have with us the management team from Nutanix. We have the CFO, Rukmini Sivaraman, and Investor Relations, Rich Valera. I'm Mike Cikos, the lead analyst here covering infrastructure software. And just for quick logistics, if you guys have any questions, please feel free to send those in. I wanna make sure we're using your time as efficiently as possible, but otherwise, happy to go through the questions I've drafted up on my side. Rukmini and Rich, thank you very much for your participation. I think—
Thank you.
Glad to be here, Mike.
Just to jump right into it, one of the things I'd like to address is just macro. And so could you give us a sense for how the tempo of customer conversations has trended, and maybe level set what are your indications as far as how people are thinking about their IT budgets this year, especially in the context of the year that we just came from?
Yeah. Thank you for having us and hosting us here, Mike. We, we appreciate it. It's great to be here. On macro, you know, what we've said, what we've seen, is that demand has been fairly steady, is how I'd characterize it. And for 2024, I mean, it's been a couple of weeks, right? So it's not like we've seen sort of a dramatic change in that time. So it continues to be steady, and we have always had a strong value proposition of really high ROI and lowering total cost of ownership. So that's always resonated, and probably more so in an environment like this. So that's how I'd characterize overall demand. And in terms of IT budgets, you know, what we expect is...
Look, I think IT budgets will grow faster than GDP, just given, you know, people are trying to think about modernizing their IT, and that software will, will grow faster than that, right? Just given that people are trying—what the people are trying to do with, you know, AI and everything else. So that's sort of maybe broadly how we're thinking about the macro and IT budgets.
Understood. And again, just at a very high level, 'cause I'd like to just parse through different layers here, but if we shift over to competition, right? Obviously, on the most recent earnings call, Nutanix actually cited the strong likelihood for market concerns regarding VMware's ownership with Broadcom now. And so can you discuss just how these conversations in the field have progressed, just because it took so long for that transaction to go through, and what you guys are seeing out there in the field?
Yes. So the deal was announced, I want to say, middle of 2022.
Right.
So exactly as you said, Mike, it's been a while. And in that time, even before the transaction closed a few weeks ago, we had seen increased level of engagement from their customers, who were wondering what this meant for them. And so that we have, of course, leaned into those engagements, and really then it's up to us to make sure people understand our value proposition, and why we're a great, you know, alternative, right, in those scenarios that folks are contemplating that. And so what we see is that there are some folks who actually went in and renewed their licenses with the VMware before the acquisition closed. And so they bought themselves some time to think about whether this changes anything from their approach.
And then others, you know, we're continuing to actively engage with them. So this, we believe, will be, will gain us some benefit, Mike, which is already baked into kind of the outlook that we've put out for this year, the small benefit, and it grows over time, over the period through fiscal year 2027, but that it will be a multi-year period. This is not sort of a step function, right? It's something that's more gradual, because different customers will have different points of view and approaches to how they, how they tackle, tackle this. Now, in terms of what's maybe changed since the transaction closed, which was just a few weeks ago, we have, you know, gone out there to our, to, to our partners, and to prospective customers to incentivize them to, consider moving over, right?
That might be, you know, one-time things that we're offering them to consider us, and things like that, as you would expect us to do, because we do believe that we are a great alternative to customers of VMware. And we're also, you know, increasing the awareness levels, if you will, right, in terms of how can we be sure that people who are considering or wondering what this means for them know that Nutanix is an alternative, right? Some of the things we are doing more recently is promotions and awareness campaigns, right, that we are turning up the volume on.
Great. And just a couple of things to tease out there, right? But the first, I know, and I think you already alluded to it, like this current year already embeds a certain benefit from VMware, right? And so I was hoping you could frame either what that contribution is or what the conviction you have in that benefit is. Again, we've seen some early wins, but I have to imagine that you're seeing a certain volume of conversations to give you that conviction to go out and say it in a public sphere, right?
Yeah. So we have said we've assumed a small benefit this year, Mike, you're right for this effect for fiscal year 2024 in our guidance, and that's expected to grow somewhat over time. Now, we've also said on our last couple of earnings calls that we have actually had transactions that we believe were influenced by this, right? So there are some data points that we can refer back to. And then, as you said, there's a volume or a pipeline of opportunities that we're looking at, and as you're making some assumptions about what percentage of those will close and at what dollar levels. So, and let me give you maybe one other way that we're thinking about, and I'm not gonna quantify it, 'cause we haven't quantified the number, but it's just sort of maybe an approach that we've taken to try and to bake in that benefit.
We are in a lot of conversations. We talked about one Global 2000 bank that's based in APAC where we believe this transaction of VMware being acquired did influence it. That's an existing customer who was using both VMware and Nutanix, okay? We were talking to them about an expansion and a renewal, and they, through our conversations with them, they came to decide that they're going to standardize on Nutanix going forward. Go single source, right?
Right.
No longer transact with the competition. And so in that example, we would have won likely a portion of that expansion anyway, and the leap from that to single sourcing was sort of influenced by the situation with the competition, right? So it's hard for us to get overly precise, because there are situations like that where it's more nuanced, right? Where there's a portion that may have happened anyway, because we have competed with VMware for a long time. So that piece is not new, and then there's probably an incremental that comes from people assessing what the acquisition of our competitor means for them.
So that's why it's a bit nuanced in that the conversations that we're having could lead to situations like that, where a customer says, "We're gonna go single source with Nutanix, with us." And there frankly may also be others, where they may use us as a negotiating leverage, right? Or where we win a smaller footprint to begin with, and then we work our way into it over time. So that makes it somewhat nuanced for us to be overly precise about the number, but those are all the factors we've considered in putting out the guidance that we did.
I appreciate the shades around those customer conversations. I think that's some great color. And maybe as background for the folks, too, can you give us a sense of, like, what has been the traditional overlap where Nutanix sees VMware in the market?
Yeah. So, I'll give you maybe a little bit of a take you back a few years, right? So we have been in the market for over 10 years, right, and sort of competed with them. For a lot of our customers, we will run... We are, and we're fine doing this, right, run our solution on VMware's hypervisor. Okay, because if you think of the most prevalent hypervisor in the market is VMware's, right?
We will run ours on their hypervisor, and then in 2015 timeframe, we introduced our own hypervisor called AHV, Acropolis Hypervisor. At that time, of course, we had no market share, we had just introduced it. But today, when you think about our installed base, almost 70% of that installed base today is actually moved over to AHV, our own hypervisor.
That gives you a sense of, you know, and those were all at some point probably VMware, because that was the real alternative, and the real first hypervisor to come to the market. And so that is a sign of how people move over, because we believe that over time, compute is gonna get commoditized, and so the hypervisor is just part of our platform. We don't monetize it separately, it's included in our platform. And so over time, even customers who began with having the VMware hypervisor have moved over to ours. Now, the other way to look at this, Mike, is if you look at their customer base, up to 200,000 customers, the vast majority of them are vSphere customers, which is their hypervisor.
Okay? Now, there is some portion of that, Mike, that's actually running on three-tier. It's not on what we would call modernized, hyper-converged infrastructure, platforms, and those are not a direct replacement, right? Meaning that people would have to actually make the decision to go from three-tier to HCI and then run on, our platform.
So in that sense, that's an architecture evolution, so I just wanna clarify that for people, that there is a portion of those customers that are not running necessarily on HCI. But we are also used to replacing three-tier legacy, right? 'Cause that's also been our bread and butter for a long time. So that's not something that we shy away from. So moving people over to HCI is one vector, and then the hypervisor, again, we're fine to run on them, and then over time they move over to our hypervisor. And the last data point I'll give you is, you know, I said almost 70% of our installed base is running our own hypervisor. So over time, we estimate we've moved about 500,000 VMs, virtual machines, from their platform onto ours.
So that motion itself is not new to us, okay? So that is something that we have done over a period of time, and we continue to help our customers to do that, right, as we have these conversations with them.
So, awesome. And I just wanted to tease something out. So I know we were talking about earlier, like, you're talking with your partners, giving incentives or putting together these messages for the market as far as how to migrate those customers over to Nutanix. From my standpoint, and again, if you could pepper this with your insights, but, you guys have always overlapped to some degree, right? You've been migrating VMware customers for some time. So how is it you guys are? What's changed now that you're doing more to get in front of customers or message that appropriately to the market? Or, should we think about that as being more of an iterative process?
While you guys had always had a focus there, maybe there's just more effort being put there today versus where we were two or three years ago. Like, again, how do we think through that?
Yes. So I think there is some of the things I alluded to when I said, you know, what have we changed since the, since the deal closed, right? So the promotions for customers, for channel partners, and then driving awareness, right? Those are all things that we've amped up now because, because we believe that we wanna be there for our customers and for our prospective customers, right? When they are wondering what this means for them. So there is a effort that's going into making sure that those, those are out there in the market, Mike, and driving the conversation, right, that we should be having. So one is, do we get to that conversation, right?
But once we get to that conversation, the second piece of your question, perhaps, is once we're having that conversation with a prospective customer, then what are the tools we have in our toolkit? So we are trying to make it really easy for them. And so we've had this tool, which you can look on, it's on our website, called Move, which helps people move over, right, migrate over.
And so that is one that, we talk to customers about, right? And we tell them, we give them examples of when we have actually migrated people over, as a way for them to know that we have experience doing this, right? Because if it's a prospective customer, clearly, they are new to us, and so we need to work with them. And of course, there's a whole sales cycle around proofs of concept, our reliability. Like, they, of course, will test all of this, especially for the larger customers. The sales cycle can take time, over 12 months in some cases. But then we're also giving them data points of how we have effectively actually made this transition over in the past with several other customers, right? To give them comfort around it.
So, so yes, there is, I think, this initial piece of, being actually able to engage, right? Some doors that were closed to us previously are now open because they now have reason to wonder what VMware might look like for them going forward, right? And then, and then once we get to that conversation, it's up to us to make sure that we are giving them all the, all the reasons why we are a great alternative and how we can ease this transition for them, right? Including, in some cases, economic incentives to do so.
Right. I think one of the things I've wondered is, like, the leveraging of GenAI technology to potentially reduce friction in a migration process. Is that something that you guys are in any capacity leveraging today? Can you use GenAI to potentially speed up a VMware migration in Nutanix, or no, that would be a mischaracterization of the potential for how that technology is used?
You know, I think... Look, a lot of these GenAI workloads, Mike, are not in production, okay? They're still in, as far as we can tell from the customer conversations that we are having, most customers are in this sort of training. "Let me train the model, and maybe let me fine-tune it," and some are maybe getting to inferencing, right? But very few, very few, if any, are running anything in production.
So when we think about... And we are, by the way, when we think about just what does AI mean for Nutanix, I think of three things, okay? One is it's a customer workload, meaning you as a customer want to run a GenAI workload. How can we help you? How can we be the platform that enables you to do that quickly and effectively? The second piece is around how do we help have GenAI help us with our own operations internally, so like a developer co-pilot, for example, would be an example of that.
And the third piece, then, how can we, you know, things like customer support, our own operations, right, things like that, that we can try. So when we think about, can GenAI help us with the migration, I think that's your specific question, possibly, right? It's something we'll, you know, we'll explore. But it's also, for us, this is such a high-stakes, thing, right? We wanna give comfort to customers when they're moving over.
Yeah.
The GenAI solutions are, aren't as, you know, battle-tested at this point for us to feel comfortable using that as a primary way, right? So the tool I talked about, Move, is something we've had for a while. It's not a GenAI solution.
Right. Yeah.
but we can go and tell a customer for sure that, "Hey, look at all these other customers that have migrated using Move and are now really happy and have grown with us," right? So that's more the primary focus. But, yeah, over time, I think you bring up an interesting point around how can we make that more efficient, in addition to, like, all the other areas that I talked about, which we are. Yeah.
Sure. And just to finish out at least the questions I had on GenAI, but you guys obviously have GPT-in-a-Box, right? And so as a reminder for the audience, can you elaborate as far as what GPT-in-a-Box is actually doing? And then the second thing, which is more interesting for me, but I'll be honest, I was surprised by the announcement on the most recent quarter that Nutanix had signed an existing customer to GPT-in-a-Box just because it seemed so soon. So again, can you walk us through how those conversations have trended? Because I think that was earlier than a lot of people had expected.
Yeah, and, I wouldn't take that one win that we talked about, Mike, as an indication that somehow it's going faster than we expected, right?
So not necessarily... Okay, okay.
Got it. This will, we still think, will be a multi-year. Part of it because we are in a hype cycle, right? As with any new technology, there is a hype cycle where there's all this you know, the steep hype curve at the beginning, and then it sort of levels off as reality sets in, and then hopefully there's a more steady and sustained growth. And we don't believe we're in that steady and sustained growth phase yet. I think there's still some hype in the market, and we have to- and people are trying to figure out, as I said earlier, "I'm training my model, I'm fine-tuning it. I'm trying to see if it can do the inferencing."
And then people have to say, "Am I realizing these benefits that are being touted before I put something in production, right? I go spend that money." So people are somewhere on that journey. And in terms of GPT-in-a-Box—
And one other just practical standpoint is that typically, when our customers are gonna be deploying GPT-in-a-Box, it's gonna be our software stack on GPU-enabled servers, and right now, just getting GPU-enabled servers is challenging. So, that's another sort of tactical short-term issue of how quickly this can ramp is—l ook at the lead times for GPU-enabled servers out there, and you can see it's not trivial.
Even beyond what you're capable of delivering, there's a market demand issue.
Right.
There's a supply issue.
The customers have to, one, figure out what's the use case, how are we gonna try it, what are we gonna do, you know, and then it's, can we actually get the hardware to deploy it, right?
Right. Right.
So, those are just another point—
It's a great call-out.
— I wanted to tell you, yeah. Thank you.
Yeah, it's an important point, Rich. Thank you. And so what we offer is, it's our, it's our base Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure platform, so it's the exact same platform, right? And what we are saying is to make it easier for people to deploy their Gen AI models on, we have combined that with some operations and management capabilities. So AIO ps, that's not ours, it's not ours. We've sort of curated a set of AIO ps capabilities that folks can use, and then we also offer the ability for them to bring their own large language models in, right? The open source models that are available, to then create a solution that they can then use to actually run and train their models.
So people are wondering, how can I, how can I put the infrastructure together that I can then run my models on? And we have made that easier for them, right, by, by this curated stack that includes our cloud platform, along with these other layers, and the ability to bring in an open source LLM model that then helps them get up and running in a, in a fairly quick way. A couple of other things I'll say in terms of this whole Gen AI opportunity, one is that we believe that the, that these models will run ultimately, Mike, where the data resides. And so what I mean by that is, people may use the public cloud, for example, for the generative training, right? Where you're using some sort of publicly available domain data to train the generative training first.
But after that, typically people have to train the model on their proprietary data, and that may sit on-prem. They may not wanna put it on the cloud because they're worried about, you know, where that goes from a data sovereignty and a privacy perspective, or it might be on the edge, right? And what I mean by edge is, if you're in a retail location, and you're doing some sort of a fraud detection or some visual inspection, that data sits in the, first of all, locally, and the AI model and the results also need to be available locally and right away, right? You can't say, "I'm gonna send it to the cloud," and then take some time for it to come back.
Because if it's a fraud detection, the fraud has already happened, and the person has probably left the store already, right? By the time all that happens, it has to be local. So we believe that these models will ultimately, or at least as they get to the fine-tuning and inference phase, will have to sit where the data resides, and that's where we can play, you know, we can play a part there. In terms of use cases, we are seeing four main use cases. So one is fraud detection, I already alluded to, and that's a. And then the second one is around documents, right? Document search, document retrieval. Obviously, there's a chat, a text component to that. So that's the second one. The third one is around developer, like co-pilot, things like that.
So we're looking at that internally as well, as I said earlier. And then the fourth one is around customer support, right? So if you're a call center agent, then how can GenAI help you look at knowledge base? If the question comes in, the GenAI is able to look at all of these knowledge base articles and summarize something for the agent to handle. So those are the four use cases, and those are across verticals, right? You know, it's across financial services, government, federal, retail, legal, you know. So it, it's really across a bunch of different verticals that we're seeing.
So a lot of conversations, but as Rich pointed out, too, that we think this would be a, you know, it'll take time for it to get to a place where people are really using it in production, and in driving workloads. But this is a new workload for us, right, that our platform can run and help customers run their GenAI workloads.
If I shift over to, let's say, partnerships, so the go-to-market. I think on the partnership front, you guys significantly made the announcement around the Cisco partnership, right? They have the end-of-life date out there for HyperFlex. And just for folks here, can you discuss the opportunity there as far as maybe what's expected from yourself and Cisco as far as contributing to that partnership to ensure it's a success?
Yes. So this is an important one, partnership for us, Mike. We announced it back in August. So still early days, but what is interesting about this partnership is that Cisco sellers get compensated for selling the Nutanix solution, just like they would for any other Cisco software solution. They get a tie quota, et cetera.
They retire a quota. Yep. Okay.
Yeah. So that is, that's great, right? And for them, soon after we announced this partnership, they also announced End- of-L ife of their HyperFlex solution which was in the market. And so there's no conflict, right? From an internal perspective, it's not that there's another solution that's competing from Cisco. It's now clear that they're End- of-L ife-ing that, and their sellers can go and sell Nutanix instead. Now, what they get from this is that we are one of the leading solutions in the market. I mean, think of data center infrastructure for modernizing data centers. And so their sellers have a winning product in the market to go and sell as part of their portfolio, and over time, could also maybe help, you know, drive some of the rest of their portfolio, right?
As you think about what it means for a hybrid cloud in a multi-cloud world, where we can be a platform that helps them drive that narrative with their, with their customers. For us, of course, you know, it's a great route to market, right, on two levels. One is there is the base HyperFlex business, which we believe, you know, given their End-o f-L ife date over time, we'll have an opportunity to transition those over to our platform. And then beyond that, there is an opportunity with the general Cisco go-to-market engine, right? Which is obviously really large and, you know, well-run GTM, go-to-market machine, a strong channel presence, right? So how can we work together so they're able to drive more of the Nutanix solutions more generally into the market?
Now, you know, the fact that their sellers are getting compensated for our solutions is great, and we're excited about it. But it's also, you know, on the other hand, we have to just work to make sure that we get that mind share, because it's one of many solutions, right, that Cisco is offering. So we're doing a lot of the enablement work right now with their sellers to make sure they're... And specifically with their data center specialists, so they understand how to pitch Nutanix, right? And what's the value proposition, and why is this better than the alternatives? Like, all of that, so then they are equipped to go in and be more effective in the field with it.
So two points building off of that, but the first: With the Cisco partnership, is the margin structure consistent with the overall corporate profile? Or, like, how do we think about how that partnership is structured when translating that to the Nutanix model? That's the first. And then the second, guidance today, does that embed any benefit or contribution from the Cisco partnership?
So first one on-
I think the margin profile was your question, Mike.
Yeah.
So, the HyperFlex piece, by the way, should all be greenfield for us because customers will not have HyperFlex and Nutanix already running, right?
Right.
These are customers that we don't have today that are coming onto our platform. We are also hoping the same from the broader opportunity, right? Where we get customers... I mean, of course, Cisco's customer base is, is huge, right? Much bigger than ours. So how can we get incremental opportunity coming in? Because of the way the, the partnership is structured, yes, right, it is intended to work within our financial, broad financial profile as well, while being a win-win, right, for them as well, where it works. So what we've done is, when we've set up the guardrails around compensation and things like that, we've tried to make sure that, it is truly win-win. And where if they bring us incremental business that we, that we weren't talking to before or that we didn't have, that they get compensated appropriately for that.
But if it's a customer that we were already talking to or were far along, then it happens to still land on, you know, on a Cisco seller, for example, or they also bring it to us, then it'll be on a different incentive structure, right? Because we truly wanna make sure that this is incremental business that we're winning.
So that's how we're structured, and it does, yes, broadly fit in with the overall financial profile that you know we've laid out for ourselves. Now, the second piece around your question was on guidance.
Yes.
So, still relatively early days, we have won some deals as a, you know, with Cisco, Mike.
Most of those, almost all of them, as you can imagine, right, are ones that... But they were already very far along.
When the End-of-Life was announced, they switched over to a Nutanix solution. Those are the ones that we've won. What’s baked into the guidance is a small benefit from this, mostly towards the tail end of the year, because we, you know we think it'll take some time just for the enablement and for the sellers to really get familiar with the product. And then outside of these deals where they were already far along, the sales cycle itself is, you know, nine to 12 months, right, in some cases. So a small benefit, mostly towards the tail end of the year.
Okay. And just for a reminder to folks, too, who are thinking about that partnership, it makes sense you would be feathering that in at the end of the year because that partnership was only announced in the October timeframe. And to your point, if we're thinking about those sales cycles, I agree. I just want to point that out to the audience while they're tuning in. And if we shift over to public sector for a second, right, and the success you guys have seen in that vertical. First, has Nutanix made specific investments in public sector that are bearing fruit in the most recent results? Or how would you guys attribute the recent wins in public sector versus how you guys have been investing?
So a few, few points on how we think about, the U.S. Federal sort of public sector business, and we actually call it F ederal because we have, separate, motion around, like, state and local governments, right? So that's sort of a SLED piece. So what we said on our last earnings call, which was for the quarter ended in October, was that the Federal business, U.S. Federal business, had a, a really strong quarter, right? Which is really significant, new and expansion ACV growth year on year. So it's a strong Fed quarter anyway because it happens to be, you know, the Federal year-end, but it exceeded our expectations is sort of what we, what we said.
Now, in terms of investments and you know, how to think about that as a vertical more generally, Mike, we have really only two areas, right, where we have sort of a verticalized sort of specific go-to-market motion. One is Federal, and the other one is healthcare. And so, yes, it has been a sector or a vertical that we have actually put specific resources into over time. So nothing necessarily changed dramatically, Mike, in terms of our effort, okay, or that we... We didn't, for example, announce some new certification or anything like that. Okay? And this quarter, though, the October quarter, it did end up being more than we expected. And it was actually across agencies.
It wasn't just civil, or it wasn't just, civilian or defense, and it was actually across several agencies where we saw the strength. And I don't think we were alone also, right? There were a lot of other companies who also kind of shared that kind of a strength in the U.S. Federal business. Might have had something to do with what was happening in terms of the continuing resolution and the budget and so on. It's possible, Mike, but like I said, there wasn't anything that we changed specifically as it relates to, you know, prior to that quarter that we believe drove that outperformance. And so yeah, we'll have to see. But it was good. It was definitely a strong quarter from that perspective, and it is an area that's been strong for us over time. And that quarter does tend to be an outlier because of the fiscal year-end, and it was just better than we expected.
Okay. And if we shift gears to renewals, right? I know that the company has spoken about the availability or the available to renew pool, right, the ATR. And so, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think management commentary is that in fiscal 2024, it's gonna grow at a slower pace before we're expecting to see a re-acceleration in fiscal 2025. And so, first, is that the case? And then second, can you talk about the visibility that you have or, or remind folks why that is as far as that expected re-acceleration in the ATR?
Yeah. So you said it exactly right, Mike. I want to emphasize that this Available to Renew pool is simply a view of licenses that we've sold previously and are coming up for renewal. That's all it is, right? And so we can, because we have now the model that we are in, we have visibility. We know exactly when licenses are up for renewal, and we can see the volume of that. So the ATR itself does grow year-over-year and will continue to grow for several years because of where we are in our subscription journey and the way the waterfall, the renewal waterfall works. So it is growing, and it is. We expect it to grow this year as well. We just said it's going to grow at a slower pace for this 2024 compared to 2023, and then we'll reaccelerate in 2025. So you said it exactly, exactly right.
Now, the reasons for that are, this is again a natural sort of outflow, so there is no renewals pipeline. It's just stuff we've sold before. And so what happens in terms of the ATR pool or cohort is a reflection of what was sold previously and the durations of those transactions, right? So if we'd sold a 3-year in 3 years ago versus a five-years, three- years ago, like, those are all the dynamics that go into the ATR pool. And so you might have heard from other subscription companies who also say, "Well, the cohort this year looks like X or Y.
This is our dynamic for the cohort. The other factor we talked about was around in July of 2023, which was the last month of our last fiscal year. We had quite a number of things that drove in some more renewals coming in a bit early. Our philosophy around this is: if a customer wants to renew with us, they want to give us the PO, the purchase order, a little earlier than it was due, and they do so at good economics, we're happy to take that, right?
Because ultimately, we wanna make sure the customer's happy, that we're able to retain them, and they're transacting with us at good economics and hopefully growing, right, their footprint. And so we saw more of that than we had expected for July, and we get a question sometimes, Mike, that says, "Well, why wouldn't that happen again in 2024?" Right? And so, yes, it might. But that's why I want to take you back to the first reason I talked about, which is around the cohorts, right? And how they just fall over time. And based on what we can see right now, our current view and our view when we gave guidance for the first time, this cohort is growing but growing at a slower pace compared to last year, and we expect it to reaccelerate in 2025.
And so to the extent that evolves or changes, of course, we'll, you know, we'll definitely sort of make sure to take that factor into our assumptions and our outlook. But that's what we saw, and that's what we guided to.
Can you discuss... Is there a way to think about renewals and the contribution from renewals to billings? Is there a relationship there to delve into that you could help with us?
Yes. So I maybe start with a couple of metrics, Mike. So there's ARR, right, which is annualized value, right, of our install base. And then there is billings, which is something that's transacted. So one is a stock metric, if you will; the other one is more of a flow metric. And on ARR growth, right, like, renewals themselves aren't quite... They help us retain the base of ARR, right? So we can then grow from that base. But, and we do get appreciation, right? Meaning, if I sold you something for $100 in ARR three years ago, when it comes to renewal, we're gonna expect that to be renewed at more than $100. So it does help ARR growth in a smaller way, but it's about retention really like with ARR.
When you think about billings, though, remember, billings is everything that was transacted in any given period, and that includes renewals and new and expansion. And when we say billings, I mean Total B illings, total contract value, not necessarily annualized, right, or ACV billings. So what we have said, Mike, is over time, the proportion of our total billings that'll come from renewals will continue to increase, and that is purely passage of time, right? Because, again, we are a relatively young subscription company, and so as more and more of the subscription licenses that we've sold come up for renewal, that ATR pool, as we talked about earlier, is going to continue to grow, which means that the renewals mix as a percent of total billings will also continue to grow.
So what we said at our Investor Day back in September was in fiscal year 2023, about a third of our total billings was renewals, and the rest was new and expansion. Okay? And so that's how to think about the contribution, and we expect that the third will continue to increase. So we said by the end of the period we laid out, fiscal year 2027, about half of our total billings will come from renewals, is what we expect, versus new and expansion. And that helps us with two things, Mike. So first one is it somewhat de-risks the growth, right? So if a bigger proportion coming from renewals means that we have visibility over it, we can see it, right?
We know when it's coming up, and we have more predictability, and more confidence in it because our GRR, our gross retention rate, is 90%+. So you can say that, okay, for that portion of the billings, you have a 90%+ level of confidence that it's going to come in, okay, when we set it forward, versus new and expansion, which is, of course, we have to go and transact that, right? Every quarter, every year, that has to be gone and procured. So there's a level of visibility and predictability and confidence from just the higher the mix of renewals, okay, going into any period. Now, the other benefit we reap from that growing mix of renewals is just bottom line leverage.
Because, you know, $1 of renewal transacts much more efficiently than $1 of new and expansion. So when your mix is going to be more renewals, it helps with leverage and efficiency. So those are sort of the dynamics around renewals, but I will also say that, and we said this when we gave out our guidance for this fiscal year, we're also expecting our new and expansion performance to improve this year, right? Because, you know, we are continuing to drive, you know, more, discipline. We have initiatives that we're driving in the field, plus some of the vectors we talked about, like the VMware Broadcom situation in the market and our Cisco partnership, et cetera, also helping, with some benefit on the new and expansion piece.
Is there a similar... Can we do or try and build out, like, what are the building blocks when thinking about net new ARR? And where I'm going with this is, like, if you have $100 of net new ARR, how much is increasing contribution from existing customers? How much is from new customers? And within the existing customers, how much of that is coming from maybe... attached to newer products that Nutanix is bringing to market? Again, like, broad brushstrokes here, brush strokes, sorry, end of a long day. But how do we break down that composition of thinking about that in a new AR?
Yeah, so let me try and do it, give you some maybe quantification in maybe not exactly the way you were asking it, Mike.
Sure.
And then I'll answer the second piece more qualitatively. So on the quantification piece, right, let's just take our last full fiscal year-end, fiscal year 2023, July 2023, year-end, where we said our ARR grew about 30%, okay? Now, if you think about the building blocks of that, to use your, your terminology, we have said our GRR is 90%+, okay? So we haven't given a specific number, but it's 90%+. We said our NRR for that period was 123%.
So when you think about the 123%, it says we had, let's say, $100 of ARR last year, a year ago, but that same customer base, today they are purchasing $123 worth from us, after factoring in people who might have reduced their spend, right, or dropped off. That's the 123% from an expansion rate perspective net of churn. And so the delta between the 123% and the 130%, the 30% growth that I talked about, is now, you know, large new logos, right? Because those are folks that are now coming in that weren't purchasing from us, so they weren't in the $100 last year, and so the- but they've also helped our ARR growth, right, over the course of the year. So that's sort of the quantitative breakdown on how to think about those components. Now, within the 123%, I think that's your second part of your maybe question, which is, we have talked about three vectors that we have there to drive that expansion, and we haven't broken out the numbers there, Mike, so I'll give the qualitative answer. The three vectors are, one is more of the same, right?
So meaning you had purchased from us, let's say, a virtual desktop solution, and you want the exact same solution, but just more. You want more users.
So you went from, you know, X users to something greater than X. So that would be one vector of expansion. The second one might be a new workload, and that's sticking with that same example, right? Like, you had bought a virtual desktop infrastructure solution from us. That was your workload that you were running on our platform, and now you're adding a GenAI workload, or you're adding, you know, a collaboration software workload or some other, you know, your database workloads, for example. So that would be second vector of expansion. And then the third vector is selling more of our portfolio. So typically, people would purchase our core Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure platform, but then they may add our cloud management solutions. They may add a Nutanix Unified Storage or Nutanix database solution, right? So that would be the third vector.
So more, more, buying more of the same, more workloads, and then more of the portfolio. Those are sort of the three vectors, and but we haven't quantified those, but to give you a sense qualitatively of how that 123% comes about, it's through these three vectors.
Okay. Well, just wanted to try for it. But no, I know with that we're at time. But I really do appreciate the audience for attending, and to the Nutanix management team, Rukmini and Rich, thank you very much. I really do appreciate it.
Thank you so much for hosting us, Mike. Thank you.
My pleasure, Mike. Thank you.
Thank you for joining.
Take care. Bye.