VP & Managing Director – Southern Asia
Nutanix
India’s cloud and AI revolution is no longer just a local success story—it’s becoming a global blueprint. In an exclusive conversation with CIO&Leader, Faiz Shakir, Vice President & Managing Director – Southern Asia at Nutanix, explores how India is shaping the future of enterprise infrastructure, driving innovation from the ground up, and transforming into a strategic hub for global R&D. From hybrid multicloud adoption to AI-ready platforms, Faiz unpacks the shifts CIOs must navigate to stay agile, resilient, and future-ready in an increasingly digital-first world.
CIO&Leader: How is India’s evolving cloud and AI landscape influencing global enterprise technology strategies?
Faiz Shakir: India’s rapidly evolving cloud and AI landscape, with its scale and rate of innovation, plays a crucial role in shaping global enterprise technology strategies. With a deep talent pool, fast digital adoption, and rising demand for secure, agile infrastructure, India is emerging as a blueprint for IT modernization. Sectors like BFSI, manufacturing, and healthcare are leveraging AI and hybrid multicloud to streamline operations and harness real-time insights.
Nutanix is at the forefront of this shift, delivering a unified, AI-ready hybrid multicloud platform that simplifies complexity and ensures secure, scalable, and compliant deployments, empowering enterprises to accelerate transformation and set new standards in agility and efficiency.
CIO&Leader: What role is hybrid multi-cloud playing in shaping next-gen infrastructure across sectors like BFSI and manufacturing?
Faiz Shakir: Hybrid multicloud is quickly becoming the go-to infrastructure strategy for leading sectors, such as BFSI and manufacturing, in India. The 2025 Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index revealed that 44% of Indian enterprises use hybrid multicloud, and this number is set to nearly double in the coming years. Additionally, 12% use a mix of private infrastructure and two or more public clouds, but this is expected to grow to 63% within three years. What’s driving this shift?
There is a need for more flexibility, better data control, and improved performance. Nutanix is helping make this possible with a platform that makes it easier to move workloads, manage data securely, and reduce complexity, allowing banks to offer real-time insights and manufacturers to process data at the edge and scale AI without the hassle.
CIO&Leader: With 60% of your engineering talent based in India, how do you see the country’s role in shaping innovation at scale?
Faiz Shakir: India plays a pivotal role in driving innovation at scale for Nutanix. We have a large engineering team based here that leads our global R&D efforts in next-generation cloud technologies, including AI, automation, and edge computing, which powers the development of cutting-edge solutions across our portfolio. The depth of talent, combined with the diversity and complexity of deployments across BFSI, IT/ITeS, manufacturing, and healthcare, fuels continuous advancements of our solutions to meet customer needs. As cloud adoption surges and digital infrastructure becomes foundational to business strategy, India is rapidly evolving from a talent hub to a strategic innovation powerhouse.
We expect India to become our second-largest market globally, serving as a critical engine for shaping the future of enterprise technology and global digital transformation.
CIO&Leader: What are some emerging patterns in cloud adoption across ASEAN and South Asia, and how do they differ from mature markets?
Faiz Shakir: We’re seeing strong demand for unified solutions that simplify multicloud management while delivering consistency across private, public, and edge environments. This shift reflects a strategic move toward future-ready IT infrastructure that balances performance, control, and flexibility in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
CIO&Leader: As AI becomes foundational to IT strategy, how are enterprises balancing performance, governance, and cost?
Faiz Shakir: AI is becoming a key driver of infrastructure decisions, pushing enterprises to find the right balance between performance, governance, and cost. To stay competitive, many organizations are adopting hybrid multicloud environments, which bring compute closer to data, improve efficiency, and meet data residency requirements. Governance is also top of mind, with organizations building secure, compliant systems to ensure AI is used responsibly. At the same time, flexible consumption models and workload mobility help control costs without compromising agility.
Nutanix helps make this possible with an AI-ready platform that offers scalability, built-in governance, and cost efficiency, enabling businesses to innovate confidently while maintaining control.
CIO&Leader: Post the VMware-Broadcom deal, how should CIOs approach vendor diversification and infrastructure modernisation?
Faiz Shakir: Today’s CIOs are reassessing their IT strategies with a sharper focus on vendor diversification and long-term infrastructure resilience. The shift highlights the importance of avoiding over-reliance on any single provider and adopting open, flexible platforms that support choice and agility. At Nutanix, we’re seeing increased interest from enterprises looking to modernize their infrastructure with a vendor-neutral, hybrid multicloud approach. Our platform provides the freedom to run applications and manage data across private and public clouds, as well as at the edge, with consistent performance, governance, and control. CIOs should prioritize modernization strategies that reduce uncomfortable levels of lock-in, enhance interoperability, and align with evolving business needs. This is a pivotal opportunity to build a future-ready, cloud-smart infrastructure that strikes a balance between innovation, operational stability, and cost efficiency.
CIO&Leader: How is Nutanix evolving its portfolio to meet the changing demands of multi-cloud, AI, and digital-first enterprises in this region?
Faiz Shakir: Enterprises across the region are embracing multicloud, AI, and digital-first strategies to boost agility and drive innovation. To meet these evolving needs, Nutanix is reimagining its portfolio with a cloud-smart platform that enables seamless workload portability across private, public, and edge environments, crucial for businesses in complex, regulated markets.
Our AI-ready infrastructure is designed for high-performance, data-intensive workloads, enabling faster model training and secure, scalable inference. Innovations in unified storage, database-as-a-service, and intelligent automation help simplify operations and speed up time-to-value. With flexible consumption and built-in governance, Nutanix empowers digital-first enterprises to scale, modernize, and fully leverage the power of AI and modern applications on a single unified platform.