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Till earlier this year, there was concern if hyperconverged storage provider Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX) could manage to sustain its Billion Dollar Unicorn status. But recent quarterly results and its strategic moves suggest that the company may be back on track.

Nutanix’s Financials

Nutanix’s fourth quarter revenues grew 62% over the year to $226 million, ahead of the market’s forecast of $218 million. Billings for the quarter increased 40% to $289.2 million and deferred revenue increased 77% to $526.1 million. Net loss of $0.33 came in better than the Street’s estimated loss of $0.38 per share.

By segment, product revenues grew 57% to $171.7 million and revenues from support and other services increased 78% to $54.4 million.

Nutanix ended the year with revenues growing 72% to $766.9 million. GAAP net loss per share of $3.57 was lower than previous year’s GAAP net loss per share of $3.83.

For the current quarter, Nutanix forecast revenues of $240-$250 million, significantly ahead of the consensus of $232 million. Net loss was estimated at $0.37, in line with market expectations.

Nutanix’s Google Tie-up

The quarter’s performance and market confidence in Nutanix is buoyed by its recent tie-up with Google. Earlier this summer, the company entered a strategic alliance with Google Cloud. The tie-up with Google will allow joint customers to deploy and manage both cloud-based and traditional enterprise applications as a unified public cloud service. They will be able to integrate the Nutanix environment with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and the two companies will partner to address the technology opportunities for building and operating hybrid clouds that integrate the benefits of private cloud architectures with scalable public cloud environments.

Enterprise customers will have access to a single click hybrid set-up for managing applications between GCP and Nutanix cloud environments. Customers will be able to provision traditional and cloud-native applications into GCP or Nutanix cloud environments with a single click, and even migrate between the two cloud environments seamlessly.

As part of the integration, Nutanix also released Nutanix Xi Cloud Services on GCP. The services allow Nutanix customers to natively extend their datacenter environment into GCP and provide an integrated approach to delivering both traditional Mode 1 and modern Mode 2 applications. It simplifies the process of shifting operations between private and public clouds.

Finally, keeping in mind the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) industry, the two companies have also agreed to collaborate on use-cases. They will integrate real-time edge intelligence with core cloud computing so that customers will be able to train machine learning models and run analytics.

Analysts have been very positive with regards to the deal. Post the announcement, Oppenheimer analyst Ittai Kidron reiterated an Outperform rating on Nutanix shares with a price target of $34.00. Baird analyst Jayson Noland also rated the stock as Outperform with a price target of $28.00.

It is currently trading at $22.48 with a market capitalization of $3.25 billion. It had fallen to a 52-week low of $14.38 in April this year. It had listed in October last year at $16 and had climbed to its 52-week high of $46.78 shortly thereafter.

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