Event Momentum Shows Nutanix's Growing Industry Pull

The energy was palpable as Nutanix kicked off its annual .NEXT conference with record-breaking attendance and partner participation. What began as a hyperconverged infrastructure company has clearly evolved into a major platform player in the enterprise IT space.

"This week, we had our partner Leadership Summit talking about partnership opportunities," explained Lee Caswell, SVP, Product and Solutions Marketing at Nutanix, providing an overview of the event. "The partner attendance and sponsorship has been overwhelming. Two years ago, we had 31 sponsors. Last year, we had 55 sponsors. This year, 85 sponsors."

This dramatic growth in partnerships includes all major hyperscalers - Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud - a clear indication of Nutanix's expanding ecosystem. The day one event itself is structured around keynotes from President and CEO, Rajiv Ramaswami, followed by a technical keynote on day two that will feature deeper demonstrations of the announced technologies.

Beyond the impressive vendor participation, Caswell noted a particularly interesting trend: "The number of prospects is increasing dramatically as well. A lot of customers took a look at Nutanix maybe five or eight years ago, thought they knew what the company was, went on their way, and now have been coming back in force to really understand what Nutanix looks like as an alternative, largely to VMware."

With HCI (Hyperconverged Infrastructure) at just 20% market penetration according to Caswell, there remains massive growth potential for Nutanix as companies reconsider their infrastructure strategies.

Modern Infrastructure: The New Storage Strategy

Embracing External Storage Partners

Perhaps the most surprising announcement came in the form of new storage partnerships that represent a notable evolution in Nutanix's approach to the market. For a company once known for its "No SANs" messaging, the announcements of integrations with Pure Storage and Dell PowerFlex mark a pragmatic shift.

"Our press forward on HCI is undaunted, unstopped," Caswell emphasized. "We continue to press the market to adopt HCI. However, the reality is that we view the largest customers will have both storage and HCI, just like we're seeing them have virtual machines and containers. It's similar, right? And we're giving customers choice."

The Pure Storage partnership announcement comes as an Early Access (EA) offering with General Availability (GA) expected by the end of the year. This follows last year's Dell PowerFlex EA announcement, which has now reached GA status. Pure Storage's presence as a platinum sponsor at the event underscores the significance of this collaboration for both companies.

Caswell explained the technical approach: "If you initiate a snapshot, for example, you initiate it from Prism over here, and it's executed in the data path over on the PowerFlex side. So you've got this nice interaction." This design maintains Nutanix's value-add management layer while leveraging external storage systems.

VDI Ecosystem Expansion

The virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) ecosystem around Nutanix is also growing, with significant announcements from both Omnissa and Citrix extending their support and integrations.

"Omnissa is doing a blog saying they're now supporting Nutanix. It's a great signal to the market around an ex-VMware company now supporting Nutanix and giving their customers choice. That wasn't always the case," noted Caswell.

Similarly, Citrix is expanding its integration with Nutanix, enabling customers to launch Prism or automatically deploy Citrix through Prism. The integration now extends to NetScaler support, which Caswell described as "the load balancing and security for the largest virtual desktop implementations."

Modernizing the Developer Experience

From Hypervisors to Kubernetes: A Natural Evolution

The second major theme of the event centered on supporting modern developers, particularly through expanded container capabilities. Nutanix announced the first product from "Project Beacon," which enables running Nutanix AOS directly on Kubernetes runtimes without requiring a hypervisor.

Caswell highlighted how this builds on Nutanix's architectural philosophy: "One of the things when our first product, AOS, the storage element of what we delivered first - vSphere was a very stable and supported product. And so the idea was that our offering was architected independent of vSphere. That modular approach meant that we could have a choice of hypervisor."

This independence has paid dividends - Caswell shared that when he joined the company three years ago, 50% of customers ran AHV (Acropolis Hypervisor), and today that number has jumped to 78% of workloads.

The next step in this evolution is removing the hypervisor requirement entirely. "Now we're going to show that you could run on a native Kubernetes runtime, and that's going to help us push further into the cloud and deeper into the edge," Caswell explained.

Expanding Container Capabilities

Nutanix's acquisition of D2iQ plays a key role in its container strategy. This mature container platform has been shipping for six years and offers flexibility in deployment options.

"It was architected independent of a hypervisor, so it can run on a hypervisor, choice of hypervisor, it can run on a bare metal Kubernetes instance, it can run natively in a hyperscaler," said Caswell, pointing to the versatility that aligns with Nutanix's overall approach.

The company also announced a partnership with Canonical for enterprise Ubuntu support, extending Nutanix's reach for container deployments at the edge. "The idea now that we have support for an enterprise experience at the edge with Canonical actually extends that reach for our containers, our Kubernetes platform," Caswell noted.

AI Takes Center Stage

Beyond Basic LLMs: Agentic AI and Workflows

Like most tech conferences in 2025, AI featured prominently at .NEXT, but Nutanix is focusing on production-ready AI implementations rather than just theoretical use cases.

"We're talking about agentic AI and agentic workflows. What does that mean? How are customers trying to get to production-ready agentic AI? Because it's more complicated. It's not just an LLM or access to an LLM," explained Caswell. "Now I need to have access to new models, for example, embedding, re-ranking, and guardrails."

These more sophisticated workflows represent the next frontier for enterprise AI adoption, and Nutanix is positioning itself as the platform that can simplify this complexity.

NVIDIA Partnership Deepens

Nutanix's collaboration with NVIDIA continues to expand, with certifications for NVIDIA AI Enterprise and the NVIDIA AI Data Platform.

"NVIDIA sees us as a path to bring AI into the enterprise in a way that takes out all of the infrastructure complexity and frees up the developers to focus on their application," Caswell shared.

The partnership includes integration with NVIDIA's Nim architectures (NVIDIA inferencing microservices) and Nemo models, providing Nutanix customers with access to advanced AI capabilities like re-ranking and guardrails.

Caswell described the agentic cycle that goes beyond simple model responses: "The guardrail model may take in your legal position. The guardrail model may take in how you think about, from an ethical standpoint, what the results look like. Re-ranking could be a way to say I took the context of the search query, and I go and re-rank the results based on the context of who you are as a requester."

Strategic Positioning Against Broadcom

A recurring theme throughout Caswell's presentation was Nutanix's positioning as an alternative to VMware, particularly in light of the Broadcom acquisition. The company frames its comprehensive platform as a way to "de-risk" from potential Broadcom-related challenges.

"What this means is I'm able to de-risk a large amount of Broadcom risk. I swap out vSphere for AHV. I don't need SRM, which is the VMware licensing called Site Recovery Manager, which is around replication and DR, and I can use the integrated data protection we have. And I don't need NSX, because I can use our Flow capabilities for micro-segmentation in the Nutanix offering."

When asked about customer dynamics around VMware licenses, Caswell observed: "In my experience right now, customers are signing up for a three-year ELA at some point within the last year, in order to basically be able to keep the wheels running. And then every customer that I talk to, not a single one excluded, is looking at alternatives."

The Future: Run Anything, Anywhere

Nutanix's overall theme for .NEXT 2025 is "Run Anything, Anywhere," and the announcements clearly support this vision. The company is expanding where workloads can run (external storage, Google Cloud), what can be run (more VDI workloads, agentic AI, Kubernetes), and how they can be deployed (with or without hypervisors).

"We've extended running anywhere to running on external storage and Google Cloud. We've extended running anything to now more VDI workloads, more agentic AI workloads, and now Kubernetes workloads that can run anywhere, independent of whether a hypervisor is required," summarized Caswell.

As Nutanix continues to evolve from its HCI roots to a comprehensive enterprise cloud platform, these announcements position the company as a flexible alternative for organizations looking to modernize their infrastructure while maintaining freedom of choice - whether that's hypervisor selection, storage options, or container platforms.

With Day 2 of the event promising more technical deep dives and demonstrations, it's clear that Nutanix is pushing forward on multiple fronts to establish itself as a key player in the next generation of enterprise IT.

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