Nutanix – the virtualization infrastructure startup that raised a massive US$101m from investors in January this year – is on a journey to the public market, and it has made a number of new announcements this month that will help it to get to its initial public offering (IPO).

This week it appointed a new CFO, 18-year veteran Duston Williams who previously worked as CFO for Gigamon and Sandforce, which was acquired by LSI Corporation for $400m.

Duston also led Infinera’s $210m IPO in June 2007 and its second offering of $220m four months later.

Nutanix head of marketing Howard Ting said the company has done better than expected in the last year, picking up sales in new territories including Germany and Switzerland.

It is also placing more funding into R&D, especially in the areas of analytics and hybrid cloud and building out services to support its user base.

“We have put a pretty significant investment into services,” Ting said. “This has led us to penetrate the Global 2000 enterprise market, which we are now putting more investment into in areas such as support.”

Ting said the company plans to become public in the next one to two years and with this in mind it has been considering key aspects of its sell, such as its supply chain and customer mix.

“We have to be careful as you have seen companies like Gigamon lose one major deal with multiple millions of dollars, which can have a dramatic impact,” Ting said.

“But Gigamon has a relatively small addressable market. We are selling now to the biggest area in infrastructure - there is something like 50bn servers and of those 35bn are storage out there and we can target this market."

“Nutanix is becoming extremely diversified – the amount of total revenue that comes from one customer is less than 10%, from one vertical 35% and one region 55%, so we feel we can be confident in ensuring future investors that we aren’t reliant on one big deal or one vertical.”

Ting said as a result of diversification, Nutanix has picked up more enterprise customers in the last year.

“When we first launched two and a half years ago we gained customers from the mid-market, and they had different needs in terms of scale and their operations and infrastructure,” Ting said.

“Having picked up more enterprise customers has made us look at some very different problems being faced by the enterprise industry around manageability and predictive analytics. This is driving us to develop new features and capabilities and pushing us to look even more at what the data center of the future needs to look like.”

Most recently this shift has led to Nutanix releasing its latest version of its Virtual Computing Platform, with a fourth-generation operation system (Nutanix Operating System – NOS - 4.0) that focusses on some of these enterprise environment demands.

“It is really about bringing the web-scale technologies to the mainstream enterprise market,” Ting said.

“You can rent space from Google and Amazon but you can’t buy their infrastructure so we built a product that can deliver a lot of the same benefits.”

This software all sits on Nutanix hardware.

Nutanix has beefed up the fabric and platform in version 4.0 to make it faster and more resilient – and more scalable.

It has also tied in new capabilities for end-to-end system analytics and multi-cluster management – including Prism Central, its remote management software that allows for the control of clusters in diverse locations.

“You can get an aggregate view across clusters to see how all VMs, disc nodes move across clusters,” Ting said.

Cluster Health is the name of a new module in Prism Central that has been added to provide visibility of the health of these Nutanix clusters. It can diagnose and resolute potential issues.

Nutanix has added MapReduce Deduplication that runs on all nodes in the cluster, which makes it ideal for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments, back-up and archiving and virtualized server workloads.

Nutanix is also now offering VDI as a service through a Desktop Program that acts like the public cloud which is priced per desktop.