Baird Sees Nutanix-Google Partnership As A Positive

Nutanix Inc NTNX shares jumped 9.2 percent on Wednesday after the company announced a new partnership with Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL that will allow Nutanix customers to easily move workloads to Google’s cloud platform.

At Nutanix’s .NEXT event, the company provided details about the new partnership, which Baird analyst Jayson Noland says is a positive move for Nutanix toward a major opportunity in the enterprise cloud business.

After attending day one of the .NEXT event, Noland outlined the key parts of the Google. Nutanix partnership:

• Nutanix customers can use Nutanix Calm to migrate applications between Google and Nutanix’s environments.
• Nutanix customers will be able to extend their datacenter environment into GCP which will eliminate the need for repetitive data migration.
• Customers can use container-based applications that integrate Kubernetes, Google Container Engine and Acropolis Container Services.
• Google and Nutanix will also collaborate on IoT features as well.

“We view the Google partnership as a positive step toward unlocking a larger ‘Enterprise Cloud’ opportunity for Nutanix as the company positions itself to embrace a hybrid cloud opportunity beyond its core HCI products,” Noland wrote on Thursday.

Related Link: Clouds Converge With Nutanix, Google Partnership

Baird sees Nutanix as the leader in the hyperconverged market and a potential takeover candidate. The firm says the total addressable market for the company’s computing, storage and storage networking businesses is at least $100 billion.

Baird maintains an Outperform rating and $28 price target for Nutanix. Despite the big pop on the Google partnership news, Nutanix shares remain down 24.1 percent in 2017.