Phil turns to the room while I read disclosures, which nobody wants to hear anyway. So if you have any questions on research disclosures, please see the website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. Otherwise, please talk to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. I'm Meta Marshall, for those who don't know me. We are delighted to have Nutanix here with us today, Rajiv Ramaswami, CEO, and Rukmini Sivaraman, CFO. It's been a phenomenal year for Nutanix. I'm very happy to have you guys here. The stock has more than doubled, I think, since you guys were or since a year ago. Some of that has been a variety of different kind of overhangs that went throughout the business or just kind of changes in the competitive landscape.
But versus a year ago, just how has the opportunity set you have seen changed or have investors just kind of caught up with the opportunity you guys saw?
Meta, first of all, thank you for having us here. With respect to the opportunity set itself, I think I'll talk about three factors here and then also a couple of factors from our own execution perspective. On the demand side, I think one thing that's become very clear now as we talk to all our enterprise customers is they think of their world as being a hybrid world, hybrid and multi-cloud, where their applications and data are in multiple locations, not just all in the public cloud and not just all in one place, right? Multiple places, including on-prem. There's almost a renewed focus on saying, I'm going to be looking at continuing to modernize my on-prem infrastructure, look at edge applications. The latest example of that is just GenAI, which I think is also going to be another hybrid application running everywhere.
So that's a fundamental trend, number one. Number two, of course, over the last year, we've had our major competitor, VMware, being bought by Broadcom now. And that's creating a lot of unrest and concerns within our customer base as well as within the partner community. So that's the second factor. We have been also growing new channels into the market, the latest one being our partnership with Cisco. So all those factors are starting to contribute. And then from the execution side, one of the things that you know is we've gone through our business model transformation to be subscription, and we are now coming out of that. And as we come out of it, of course, we are continuing to gain leverage in the model from a renewals perspective.
Renewals businesses continue to grow every year for us as a portion of our business, and we have been doing a good job prosecuting those. And then finally, managing our OpEx quite tightly as well. So that combination, I think, is what's led to the performance.
Okay. So we've all just caught up, but you guys were there the whole time. All right. At your recent analyst day, you laid out kind of a $76 billion TAM by 2026. Just what do you see within that TAM that's kind of the biggest opportunity that we should be thinking of? And what are kind of areas where you'll continue to grow into?
Yeah. I think if you look at the core aspect of that TAM, the bulk of the TAM is simply replacing legacy infrastructure with a modern cloud-based infrastructure. And we sometimes call it replacing three-tier architectures, where compute, storage, network are separated with a more modern combined HCI architecture, where everything is managed through software, software-defined. And that's still a huge opportunity out there. And that's the bulk of the TAM that we continue to gain share into. And then there's extensions of that TAM, of course, into the public cloud with extending it seamlessly into the public cloud providers, which we've been doing in the last few years and will continue to be a vector. So that's the biggest chunk of the TAM.
Now, there are additional opportunities for us when it comes to, for example, going a layer above the stack, beyond the infrastructure layer to the platform services layer. We've got our first foray in there with what we call Nutanix Database Service. Still very early days, but lots of opportunity there as well. But I think in the short term, if you look at the TAM, the biggest opportunities come from the three factors: hybrid cloud becoming mainstream, the VMware competitive situation, and growing channel and partnerships.
Okay. So VDI has always been thought of as kind of like the killer app for HCI. But just are there other apps where you're commonly seen as that kind of next foray into the applications?
Yeah. We've come a long way since those days of VDI. This was the very early days of hyperconverged in the market. VDI was the first app to land on the platform. Today, it accounts for maybe 15% of the apps that are running on our platform and the install base. Today, the platform is capable of running pretty much every application that's out there in the enterprise, including the most mission-critical ones. We have people running their ERP systems on us, mission-critical databases on us, security workloads on us, modern applications using containers on us. The platform is very broad-based at this point. It can pretty much run all the applications on it, including the latest one that we talked about with GPT-in-a-Box where people can start running their AI, generative AI applications on the platform as well.
Okay. So an example you gave on the earnings call last week was a customer who moved their VDI back from cloud and then moved it back onto premises for better performance. Just you've talked about this kind of hybrid environment, but how often are you seeing this kind of applications either coming back on-premises or just tweaking kind of with what people thought that their strategy was for cloud versus on-premises?
Yeah. I think we do see some examples of people actually repeatedly putting public cloud workloads back on-prem. This was an example of that. By the way, I think Elon Musk was here a little earlier and.
I heard that.
After he took over Twitter or X, they actually did a bunch of repatriation, and they published white papers saying they saved like 60% or something when they did that into their own data centers. But more often than not, people are, of course, very focused on managing the cost of their public cloud environments. But the bulk of enterprise workloads are still sitting in data centers. What we see now is a much more measured view in terms of should those be continuing to be modernized in the data center versus simply moved to the public cloud. Five years ago, it was all about moving everything to the public cloud. But now the conversation is much more around, "Oh yeah, I know public cloud is easy button in some ways, but it's also very expensive.
I've got potentially other issues that I have to deal with, regulatory, sovereignty, etc. And it might make sense for me to have a lot of my workloads continue to run very efficiently in my infrastructure. So that dialogue has changed quite a bit for us in our favor.
Okay. And then just how are you kind of easing that more fluid environment across your portfolio, not just with HCI, but kind of with the entire portfolio of just making it easier for customers to kind of move their applications around?
When you say fluid, you mean across clouds or on-prem to public cloud and back?
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Yeah. So I think one of the value propositions for us is we provide that single platform that runs in exactly the same way wherever a customer wants to run their apps and their data. So that same platform that's available on-prem is also available on top of bare metal in AWS and Azure today, and hopefully other cloud providers down the road. And now with the same team, with the same set of tools, it's very easy for customers to, for example, move workloads back and forth, automated tools to do that, right? And so it makes the operations aspect of it very, very simple. You don't have to go refactor, replatform your applications to really move them around, right? You can.
What this means in practical terms is people can, for example, decide to do a cloud migration, and it can be done within a month versus taking years, for example. Or they can use the public cloud for disaster recovery of on-prem workloads. Or they can choose to use the public cloud as needed for temporary capacity expansion, spin up and back, or use it for geographic expansion. So it enables a whole set of use cases that wasn't really possible before.
Okay. So everybody here is disappointed that I got 10 minutes in without asking about VMware. So we'll kind of drive into that. So the biggest driver of the stock, probably over the last year or at least in my investor conversations, has been the opportunity that people see and we're all hearing about with VMware's acquisition. How are you guys seeing kind of that versus what you thought maybe six months ago? Just how are you seeing kind of that investor or the customer conversation evolving?
Yeah. Now, as a company, Nutanix has been competing with VMware for a very, very long time. So that part is not new to us. And we have historically migrated customers from VMware to Nutanix. In fact, in many cases, customers may start with Nutanix running on top of a VMware hypervisor. And over time today, by the way, 70% of our installed base is running on our own hypervisor, having migrated from a VMware hypervisor. So we know how to do this. We've been doing this for a long time. What's changed, of course, in the last, let's say, 18 months to now more recently, in the last 3 months even, is that now VMware historically was a very well-regarded company from a technology stack perspective, mission-critical workloads, many customers.
But now with the Broadcom acquisition, many people are concerned about increases in pricing, reduction in the level of innovation, cost cutting, which means poorer support, especially when you're running mission-critical workloads. So that's created a lot of concern and churn within our customer base as well as within Broadcom VMware's partner network, many of whom are also our channel partners. And so now the doors are more open than they were before in terms of willingness to consider alternative approaches, reducing the dependence on VMware over time. So what we say is that this is a multi-year, long-term opportunity. It's not that people are going to shift overnight. It's going to take many years. And some of the reasons for that are many of the smarter customers actually did lock in 3- to 5-year deals with VMware before the acquisition closed. That's number one.
And number two is this transition is not simply a like-for-like replacement. In many cases, it is a migration of a legacy architecture onto a modern hyperconverged architecture that sometimes gets tied to hardware refresh cycles. And so that also gets factored into the migration timeline. And number three is not everybody's going to migrate everything at once. They're going to give us a piece of the infrastructure, start small, perhaps, and then expand over time. So for these three reasons, we see this as a long-term, multi-year opportunity.
I mean, as far as that process, you've kind of mentioned this, like they'll start small and move applications. I mean, that almost seems to me like it would make your environment more complex in the near term, bringing more vendors into this space. And so kind of what is that thinking around the fact that they want to start small versus kind of just saying, "It may take a longer time, but I'm just going to move this all over at once"?
Yeah. So they might make a decision to move most of it over time. But it will have to be a phased migration, especially in the complex accounts. Now, in smaller accounts, it's very easy. I mean, there's a customer that wrote a white paper with us recently, a pediatrics healthcare group. So they've been thinking about this migration from VMware to us for like three years or so. They didn't act on it. They did a lot of planning. They didn't act on it. And then I think once the deal got done, they pulled the trigger to go do it. And they did a wholesale 100% migration in three months. And they're out of it now. But that can be done for smaller customers. Now, when you're a large customer with a large estate, it doesn't happen overnight. It takes time to migrate.
They'll probably do this in phases.
Okay. Is that application by application, or is that just data center by data? Just how do I think of what are those chunks of them?
Yeah. I mean, I think usually there tends to be workload or application by application most of the time.
Okay. Then you mentioned 70% of your customers are already using your hypervisor. I think investors have kind of thought, "Okay. Well, this is vSAN customers will kind of come over to you guys." Just how are you thinking about that opportunity of kind of VMware customers across the board, not just kind of vSAN customers coming over?
Yeah. I mean, in fact, the bulk of the VMware estate right now is not vSAN, right? It's tied to standard storage, three-tier storage. And that's a migration we've been doing for a long time, nothing new, right? We've been converting VMware connected to three-tier storage to HCI. Now, the HCI to HCI migration is more for a like-for-like migration, which tends to be easier, right? They've already adopted the HCI architecture, and now it's our HCI versus their HCI. But the three-tier is where the bigger market opportunity is. And again, we've been doing those conversions for a long time. It's just more this gives us an ability to accelerate that.
Okay. Then I think maybe when a year ago, you were kind of thinking, "Oh, maybe you were actually seeing more traction with larger customers kind of initially in conversations." More recently, you've talked about smaller customers are where you're seeing more traction. Just how are you guys thinking about that process of customers migrating over?
Yeah. I think the larger customers are more attuned to the Broadcom playbook, having seen the experience with CA before, Symantec, and the other Broadcom acquisitions in the past. So they were the ones to start the engagement process relatively early. And a lot of the smaller customers had no prior experience with Broadcom. They're not an enterprise provider for them. And so they have really very little awareness. But now, over the last three months since the deal is closed, there's been a lot of awareness building with respect to the changes that have been happening. And so now the smaller customers are also starting to realize, "Okay. This is a potential risk factor for them that they need to go address." And they are starting to also wake up and take notice on this.
Okay. And the other thing, if I can add something to that, Meta, so we've also continued to refine our segmentation in terms of where we're pointing our resources. So when you think of that segmentation, at the top of the pyramid, the largest customers, right, which clearly are important to Rajiv's point, they almost engage with us early on. There's a middle tier that I would say is still enterprise, but probably slightly smaller than the largest group, where we have our resources focused. And they're the ones that are starting to realize now what this means for them. And then in sort of the bottommost tier is where, think of that as more commercial, where we've sort of really left that to the channel. And channel has been an opportunity for us for a while.
So we've said we'd love for the channel to go and execute on that tier. We don't really have any direct resources, our employees, targeted there because we want the channel to be empowered to go bring that in. The channel now also has an additional catalyst than what they had before because Broadcom has said they're going to take some of these customers direct, right? So there's sort of an additional incentive for them to consider us as a more viable alternative. All right.
I mean, you've talked about strength with other portions of the portfolio, but are there other portfolio additions that you need to kind of round out the stack for VMware customers? Or do you have everything you need today, and it's just kind of highlighting the customers that you have?
I think for the most part, we have everything we need today. Our Nutanix Cloud Platform has a full stack, includes compute virtualization, storage virtualization, network virtualization, and operations and automation. So it's pretty much a full stack.
Okay. Are there partnerships? I mean, we'll talk about Cisco in a minute, but are there partnerships with other kind of ecosystem vendors that you think can make better inroads kind of together?
Yeah. We have a broad ecosystem, and we've been working to build that ecosystem. For example, all the backup providers, that's a complementary ecosystem to us, security providers. Those are also very much part of our ecosystem. People like Palo Alto Networks, for example, on the one side. On the other side, you've got Veeam, Rubrik, Cohesity, and a whole bunch of other players on the backup side, for example. Modern applications, we have a strong partnership with Red Hat for OpenShift and OpenShift running on top of a Nutanix platform. And then our public cloud partnerships and ecosystems with both AWS and Azure.
So clearly, I think we live in a world where we work together with these best-of-breed ecosystem players to provide ultimately whatever the solution is that the customer wants because the customer is going to need a full-stack solution that can run in many multiple locations, has built-in security, has backup capabilities. So that's what we try to provide.
Okay. Okay. That's helpful. The other kind of incremental piece that you mentioned was just kind of the growing go-to-market or partnership channels. Cisco has clearly been a help here. I think a question that we often get or have ourselves is just, should we think of that as, "Okay. They're first going to go after the HyperFlex business, and that's kind of the nearest-term opportunity for you guys"? Or is it they have reached to all of these large customers that are probably largely parallel with VMware, and so they're going to kind of help you get inroads into the cloud platform?
Yeah. I mean, I think the low-hanging, of course, wins are converting over the existing HyperFlex space. But that was never big to begin with. That was a relatively small portion of the market from a share perspective. The opportunity that both Cisco and us, we both see this as being an opportunity to expand our relationship well beyond the HyperFlex install base to grabbing new customers, right? So our interest together is really to go land more customers on the Nutanix platform beyond the HyperFlex install base. And we'll convert, of course, to HyperFlex customers.
Okay. Okay. It's TMT 2024, have to ask about AI. You have a GPT-in-a-Box solution where you've seen early interest. Just where are your customers in their AI journeys, and just how do you see kind of helping them along the way?
Most of our enterprise customers are pretty early in their journey. They're all experimenting. Everybody is looking at how they can use generative AI to make themselves more productive, more automated, more efficient, and potentially create some new capabilities. Most of them are also in the early stages of experimentation, trying to figure out where it can provide legitimate business benefits, ROI, for the investment that they make. With that in mind, what we are doing is to help them run these AI applications where their data resides. The data is not all residing in the public cloud. The data is some of it in the public cloud. Clearly, there's been also a lot of focus of training large language models in the public cloud on generic data.
But for enterprise customers to make use of it, they also have to fine-tune those models on their own datasets and then run inferencing wherever the data is, which in many cases could be, for example, at the edges. Like if you're a manufacturing company, then you might, for example, be using your machinery in your shops to in your manufacturing plants, generating a lot of data. And you might be using the analytics on that data to optimize how you run your manufacturing process. So that's an example. And that's where we can help customers, right? We can help customers fine-tune those models on their data and then use this for inferencing wherever they'd like to do the inferencing.
Okay. Do you think that there's other opportunities? Just clearly, GPT-in-a-Box has kind of been that first foray. But just in terms of easier datasets you know that they're going to need or application workloads that you know are going to be most helpful kind of as you look towards AI, where you can expand kind of the addressable market?
I think the four use cases that we see for generative AI. I think one of them is around customer service. It's not just chatbots, by the way. That's the easy part. But even what we are doing internally, which is using GenAI to see if we can actually get faster resolution to incoming customer requests by searching through our knowledge base of articles and coming to a quicker resolution, being an assist, a co-pilot to our customers, to our support engineers. And of course, developers, right? Productivity assist for our developers, very important co-piloting there. We're seeing document summarization search being a big use case as well, and then enhanced fraud detection. These are the type of use cases that our customers are using us for.
Okay. Okay. That's perfect. Hey, Rukmini, moving over to you. Nutanix was at a tail end of a business model transition when you stepped into the CFO position. Since then, you've improved operating margins, 1,800 basis points kind of between what's expected this year and fiscal year 2022. And cash flow went from essentially break-even to kind of a midpoint of $430 million this fiscal year. Just where have you found kind of that efficiency in the model, particularly against kind of a very large opportunity you're addressing?
Yeah. And I would say I think this is a result of the model playing out as I think we hypothesized it would, Meta. And I've only been a CFO in this role for coming up on two years, but I was with the company longer than that. And it's definitely been through that journey. And this was always the thesis, right, which is that once we emerge from completing the transformation phase, if you will, that the leverage in the model will start to play out. If you look at our total billings, as the mix of that comes more and more increasingly from renewals, which we're starting to see. And I think that's what everything that you just talked about in terms of operating margin, free cash flow margin at 20% at the midpoint of our guidance for this year, that's a big driver of all of this.
The other piece, and I think you alluded to this at the end of your question in terms of the growth opportunity and how do we think about investing for that. So if you look at our operating expense profile over the look at fiscal year 2023, so last year and going back, our operating expense in absolute dollars actually was flat, actually slightly down compared to fiscal year 2020. So we were very disciplined in that time in order to complete the business model transition and also some work we were doing internally to make sure we were getting more efficient and effective. This year, coming into fiscal year 2024, our year-end is in July, we made a very deliberate decision to invest because we see the opportunity. We've talked about all the growth drivers here.
We think now is the time because you invest in sales and marketing or in R&D, there's a ramp time before those folks can be fully productive. We want to make sure we're investing in the places with the highest ROI and where it's pointed in the right direction along with allowing for some time for those folks to ramp. So if you look at this year versus last year, there's an implied increase in OpEx. Even second half of the year versus first half, there's a meaningful step up because we are investing. The areas we're investing are both in go-to-market and in R&D. On the go-to-market side, it's a few different areas. From a sales rep perspective, we would like to hire a few more folks before the end of the year.
We're not very far off from where we'd like to be, but there's a few more folks we'd like to hire. Then there are other areas like channel where we've talked about where we're investing more, both from a headcount perspective, but also incentives for the channel to bring us incremental business. Then lastly, on the sales and marketing side, more awareness, right? Like how can we amplify the volume of our messaging in the market so folks know what we bring to the table and why they should consider us? Then in R&D, Rajiv's talked about our areas. We have a pretty ambitious innovation roadmap. It's something that we want to continue to do, especially in an environment where our competitors may or may not be investing as much in innovation. That remains a priority.
You'll see both of those lines continue to kind of tick up here over the rest of the year.
I mean, I think I asked you this question at the analyst day about how you could find so much leverage when you're investing so much. And I think part of the answer you gave me was like, "Well, we've always been addressing these customers. We've always been kind of targeting these customers." And so is there a way to think of, "Okay. How much of these investments are kind of net new markets or amplifying net new products versus we'd always kind of had great customer coverage?
Yeah. So I think on the investment side, a lot of the things I talked about here on the sales and marketing side, certainly, are focused on driving incremental growth, right? So it's really on the new and expansion side, Meta, because to your point, when we think about ARR growth, for example, right, that, of course, is an element of retention and making sure we're prosecuting on our renewals really well. But that growth, big driver there is all of the new and expansion business, right, and getting more of that in the door. So that's certainly a driver. The other thing I'll say, especially on free cash flow, is that we collect largely our cash upfront from customers, right? And so if a customer is doing a three-year transaction with us, we collect all of that three years of cash upfront.
And so that gets amplified from sort of an annualized versus a cash flow perspective. It's amplified somewhat on the free cash flow line. But yeah, I think it's the renewal mix going up. And then it's sort of, I think, investing where we see the opportunity for new and expansion and doing that in a thoughtful way.
I mean, maybe for both of you, you mentioned you want to kind of amp up the sales rep. I would assume there's a lot of good reps and kind of sales leaders available from kind of your competitors. I mean, as you look at that, is it simply a matter of, "Hey, we know who reps the top 1,000 accounts, and we think about bringing those over"? Or how much of your hiring is focused on hiring away from competitors versus maybe new other software companies, other kind of areas where you're finding the deepest pool to hire?
In fact, the talent market for us has actually been very good over the last year and a half or so, I would say. And we have had no trouble upgrading our talent pool across the board, whether it's in sales, whether it's sales leadership, whether it's in marketing, whether it's in product engineering. And we're able to get people from multiple kinds of companies, not just VMware, okay? Of course, that's an obvious choice. And we have our share of VMware alums who are here, including me. But even from the other hyperscalers, for example, we've been able to hire people over the last year, year and a half, and across a wide spectrum of companies. So the market is pretty good right now for talent. We are, as Rukmini said, hiring judiciously, adding in both R&D and sales.
So you are seeing that step up for us in the OpEx line. But we're also not going crazy here. We're not hiring well beyond because our goal is still to continue ultimately to drive profitable growth, right? Continue to drive growth and increase leverage on the bottom line. So we want to make sure we continue to achieve those goals while at the same time making sure we invest enough to capture the growth opportunity out of us.
Okay. I mean, maybe I'll kind of go to market expansion with the channel. Clearly, Cisco is a great new avenue for you guys. And there's a lot of disrupted kind of VMware channel partners. But just how are you? There's probably a lot of people you could add right now. How are you being disciplined about kind of channel or go-to-market to kind of amplify the voice that you guys can have internally?
Yeah. I mean, I think getting more leverage from our channel has been one of our priorities for the last three years since I started. And we've been working on enabling that, giving them more autonomy, giving them more incentives. In fact, last year, we took the step of segmenting our three tiers in the go-to-market. The third tier at the bottom is all completely left to the channel to prosecute. And they get more rewards, more incentives for them to go do this themselves. And so we are continuing to invest in those channel partners. Many of our channel partners are also servicing other competitors in the market. But this is an opportunity for us to get more with them and more driving.
We have been giving them incentives to bring in new customer logos for us, which are new to us maybe, but not new to them because they're already servicing those customers. If there's an opportunity, so we want to incentivize them to bring those customers to us.
Okay. Okay. Perfect. I have a whole list of other questions. But any questions from the audience? All right. Perfect. Maybe for Rukmini, you've talked about at the analyst day, basically, we're going to have some deceleration in ACV billings this year or billings growth this year and then kind of re-acceleration into fiscal 2025. You've also kind of talked about some of these renewal cohorts and kind of the size of that. Just how much of that should we kind of or what should we think of the contribution of kind of these renewal cohorts to some of that deceleration, re-acceleration that we've seen?
Yeah. So I think the renewal cohort, as you talk about, just to maybe frame what we mean when we say that, right, is we look at what is available to renew or ATR, or renewal cohort is another term for it, which is just things that we've thought before and are coming up for renewal in any given period. So what, Meta, you're referring to, as you rightly point out, is that at our analyst day back in September, what we said is that the pool of that renewal, so how much is coming to renew in each given year, is going to continue to grow for several years to come. So it is growing in 2024 compared to 2023. But the pace of that growth was decelerating relative to 2023 and was going to re-accelerate in 2025.
A big driver of that was just how the cohorts play out, which is customers buy licenses from us that may be anywhere from 1 to 5 years, sometimes less than 1 year, rarely, but sometimes more or less. And so it just depends on the mix of that and when those deals come up for renewal, right? So that's what's driving the cohort. So passage of time, really. And so there was that dynamic that was causing this deceleration and then acceleration. So that's certainly one driver. And that remains the case. We obviously monitor this on an ongoing basis. And we still see that re-acceleration happening in 2025.
The one other piece, I think, just to call out a caveat is there are one-year deals that we will do in the second half of this fiscal year that will, of course, impact the ATR or the renewal pool for next year. So that dynamic still remains. The other thing that could move this is our renewals teams choosing to sort of do things a bit early, which we have seen, or do coterms, which is taking all of our licenses of the entire estate and kind of making them coterminous at a single date, all of which are generally good. We don't mind early renewals because it helps us lock in the customer. And if it comes as good, get good economics, and they're giving us the cash for it, we're happy to have them. It's important that we retain the customer.
Those can move this around somewhat as these may move over annual boundaries. I think our focus is still on making sure we retain the customer. They remain happy. They're expanding with us and all of that. As of now, we still see that dynamic of re-acceleration into fiscal year 2025. We haven't quantified that, Meta, beyond what we said at investor day. As we sort of think about guiding for next year, we'll continue to monitor that.
Okay. And then another question we get sometimes is just, is there any kind of meaningful impact of pricing increases that have kind of come into effect over the last couple of years that's kind of driving growth that we should just be mindful of?
So we do periodically look at assess pricing in the market and have made some adjustments and price increases over the last few years, mostly to keep up with inflation. That's how folks should think about that. And so we'll continue to do that as the market evolves. So that's on the new and expansion kind of list price dynamic. And then on renewals, what we do is even there, so let's say someone had purchased from us three years ago, and it comes up for renewal, same thing, right? Like we will adjust that price up for inflation or for a duration change if they're deciding to make that. And we've gotten better at being able to capture those economics over time.
For example, in the most recent quarter, for the January quarter, we did talk about that as being one factor of performance on the renewal side: our ability to capture that uplift.
Okay. And then just thinking about how kind of macro is influencing how you're thinking about the business, just cloud optimization seems to be kind of waning in terms of a headwind. Just what are you seeing in terms of kind of macro overhang to the environment or just kind of engagements in new projects starting again?
Yeah. I can start. And then, Rajiv, you feel free to add. So I think on macro, what we said on our call last week was still uncertain. We don't feel like we're sort of out of the woods yet. So still uncertain but stable is how we'd characterize it kind of compared to maybe three months ago or even six months ago. So stable, we're still seeing demand for our solutions, but remains uncertain. We've also talked about there still remains the additional scrutiny that folks are putting on purchases, right? So there's more, in many cases, more approval levels, things like that, which we believe is one of the contributors to somewhat elongated sales cycles compared to historical levels. And so that continues to be the case. And then do you want to talk about the cloud optimization piece, Rajiv?
Yeah. Again, I think I mentioned that at the beginning, right? So people are not simply wholesale moving to the public cloud anymore. They're optimizing what they have in the public cloud and then looking at what they should do with their on-prem footprint. And in a lot of cases, that means modernizing their on-prem footprint, running it more efficiently on-prem. So that's certainly helping us.
Okay. But they're kind of stopped going out of just conservation mode and actually started thinking about, "Okay. What does that longer-term landscape look like?
Yes.
Another question. I know I asked you this last week. Just in terms of you just mentioned in a three-year deal, you're going to get the cash upfront. There's been more sensitivity about interest rates. Your duration of contracts has kind of continued to come down. Are you assessing any sort of kind of macro pressure just from customers wanting to kind of hold onto their cash longer that's having any sort of impact?
So nothing systematic yet, although I think it's a really fair question. And the duration for us coming down is really the duration that we report out is actually a mix of new and expansion and renewals. And renewals tend to transact as with most subscription companies at a lower duration. That mix is going up for us. So that's really what's driving that duration coming down. I think the other thing I'll say is when folks purchase from us, often they're using CapEx budgets to do so, which then means that they're actually fine with an upfront overlay. But clearly, something to continue to watch. But yeah, that's why we typically collect our cash upfront.
Okay. And then just maybe as a last question, you guys have talked to a lot of investors today. Where do you find that there's still kind of the most education that's needing to be done or kind of most disconnect between how you guys think about the business and how investors understand it?
That's a good question. I think, look, for us, we are again, like I said, we feel like I think the business model has started to work and kind of see the leverage in the model. So I think there's fewer questions on that now. And now I think the question that folks are trying to answer is just, how should we think about growth drivers? And I think you asked some of those questions earlier, Meta, which is, how is this growth going to play out? When is it going to play out? And here, there's some drivers that we have more control over and others that will just take time. And so that's what I think we've been trying to educate folks on is this is more of a multi-year growth journey for us.
Now, there's some really fundamental hybrid multi-cloud drivers that are still solid and we think will drive a lot of growth. And then there are some other things that are more recent in terms of the VMware disruption in the market or otherwise, which will be more multi-year, right? So just kind of getting more of that out there has been a lot of our conversations today. Anything you want to add, Rajiv?
No. I'll add a non-financial thing, which is really about what we do as a company. I think even what you asked at the beginning, right, we deal with the workload. But it's no longer the workload for us, right? So the platform has now evolved quite a bit to really being a much broader platform, right, with many more elements to it: compute, storage, networking. So the TAM that we are going after is much bigger. We can run all the applications. And I think the awareness of what we bring to the table as a company, I think investors who have followed us a while got it. But I think a lot of investors who are new to the story are only now picking it up.
Okay. Perfect. Well, Rajiv and Rukmini, thank you so much for being here with us today.
Thank you for having us, Meta.
Great to be here. Thank you all.
Thank you.