Posted by Mumbai: After leading Nutanix India as VP and Managing Director for little over three years (2015-2018 November), Sunil Mahale has quit the company this month. Mahale has joined a Palo Alto, California based business intelligence (BI) and analytics firm ThoughtSpot on November 12, 2018.
In a new role as ThoughtSpot’s VP for Asia Pacific and Japan, Mahale will oversee firm’s operations and business in the entire Asia Pacific and Australia region including India, where it has its engineering and development facility.
Mahale will be based in Singapore and oversee company’s business operations. Interestingly, his move to ThoughtSpot leaves a big void at Nutanix’s India operations.
In fact, this is the second major top level exit Nutanix has faced in the last four months. Prior to Mahale, Sudheesh Nair, Nutanix’s President also had quit the company and joined ThoughtSpot in August this year in the role of a new CEO.
Nair was the second top executive at Nutanix after its three founders Dheeraj Pandey, Ajeet Singh and Mohit Aron. Nair had played a significant role in building, expanding and driving the revenue of the enterprise cloud computing company to over a billion in seven year span.
Like Nair, Mahale too has played a notable part in building Nutanix’s business, channel partners and driving sales in India during the past three years. Prior to Nutanix, Mahale worked at Hitachi India.
However, Ajeet Singh, one of the co-founders of Nutanix, started ThoughtSpot in 2012 and since then many of the executives have left Nutanix to join the business intelligence firm. Prior to Nutanix, Singh worked at Google.
Besides, Mohit Aron, who was also leading the role of Nutanix CTO moved out to start his own tech venture Cohesity in 2013.
With two co-founders already moved out of the hyper-converged infrastructure unicorn, CEO Dheeraj Pandey has more responsibilities and pressures on his shoulders to meet investors and shareholders’ expectations.
The exit of Nair followed by Mahale leaves CEO Pandey and Nutanix management with lots of questions in terms of rebuilding and retaining the team, and strengthening its business operations.
The immediate and foremost concern for Nutanix board and its management is to ensure there are no further top level exit or else it may affect company’s stock value, which already has fallen drastically post the weaker fourth quarter earnings.
Will Mahale’s exit have any kind of impact on Nutanix’s overall business functions and operations in India that remains to be seen in the near future.