Nutanix, the web-scale converged infrastructure company, today announced a cutting edge technology certification, the Nutanix Platform Expert (NPX). This flagship educational program, set to become the most rigorous technical qualification in enterprise computing, creates a new standard in IT certifications and highlights the increasing adoption of multi-hypervisor environments in enterprise datacenters.

The certification, which is offered free of charge, is devised by Nutanix’s customer education service nu.school. Participants will master the technical details of hyper converged infrastructure in order to determine which technology is the most appropriate for different applications and use cases. The certification program requires extensive architectural capabilities validated through written exams, a web-scale solution design, hands-on lab and design exercises, and a live peer review. Applicants must be experts in at least two hypervisor platforms and, upon graduating, will be certified by Nutanix as among the best enterprise architects in the industry.

Successful candidates will be fluent in legacy workloads and platforms while understanding the next generation of IT services and the operational models that go with them. Graduates will be able to help businesses meet the growing demand for hyper converged and multi hypervisor use cases such as big data, OpenStack and test-dev, will advise enterprises which technology is the most appropriate for their IT environment, and determine how to use that technology as efficiently as possible.

“The NPX program is our answer to the global shortage of enterprise architects who really understand the business benefits of software defined storage and hyper-convergence. They are the gateway to web-scale technology and that’s the future of IT,” said Mark Brunstad, Manager of Nutanix’s nu.school. “The market needs proven veterans who know how to successfully migrate companies to the same kind of efficient, scalable infrastructure used by Google, Facebook and Amazon. Our graduates will know how to deploy container technologies like Docker and Rocket and how to build infrastructure that supports legacy applications with OpenCompute economics.”

The NPX certification was developed by a team of 14 Nutanix experts with decades of solution design and delivery expertise between them and conducted under the guidance of Lisa S. O’Leary, a PhD psychometrician from Alpine Testing Solutions and recognized authority in the development of expert-level panel-based assessments for the IT industry. It will be offered to graduates that complete a two-stage examination progress – the NPX Program Application, followed by the NPX Design Review.

The NPX program provides mentoring from some of the world’s best enterprise architects to assist candidates on the journey to the pinnacle of IT certification, and is free to enter for qualified candidates.