Founder: Dheeraj Pandey
Date launched: 2009
Funding: $312 million
Industry disrupted: Virtual computing
Source: Nutanix
Dheeraj Pandey, founder and CEO of Nutanix
Nutanix, a San Jose, California-based data-storage company, simplifies data centers for customers by integrating servers and storage into one solution that can be up and running in an hour or less. The company was co-founded by Dheeraj Pandey, a software engineer who worked at Oracle before starting Nutanix in 2009.
The company counts AT&T, eBay, Samsung, and several branches of the U.S. government among its customers. Pandey believes his company's big advantage over competitors such as VMWare and NetApp is that Nutanix uses flash memory devices located inside individual servers instead of connecting computer servers to separate storage systems. This enables the company's software to manage data distributed on numerous machines as if that data were stored on a single system.
Read MoreFULL LIST: 2015 DISRUPTOR 50
The company has raised $312 million from equity investors such as Sapphire Ventures, Khosla Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
"What the iPhone did to music players, PCs, (video) cameras, GPS devices, voice recorders, etc., by converging them as software apps onto a single platform, Nutanix is doing that to single-purpose devices in the world of enterprise computing."
