Nutanix .NEXT 2025 Conference
Published by Jean S Bozman, President, Cloud Architects LLC
With AI and cloud as the primary drivers for change in customers’ IT landscapes, Nutanix is focusing its 2025 product and services offerings to grow its presence in AI, public clouds and on-site private clouds, and in longtime enterprise data centers.
Nutanix, based in Silicon Valley, is known for its hybrid cloud and virtualized software products. They are designed to make it easier for customers to manage highly diverse installations of servers, storage and networked systems, with security, resilience and consistent operations.
Last week’s .NEXT 2025 conference in Washington, D.C., highlighted new additions to the Nutanix current and future product roadmap. Using keynotes, breakouts and hands-on demos, Nutanix clearly communicated its timetable for making a series of new software solutions available in 2025, from the summer through year’s end – and beyond.
The drivers for hybrid cloud change are customers who are modernizing their IT infrastructure; migration from older physical and virtualized systems in the data center; and working to achieve more efficient and effective IT operations across multiple sites. The aim, as expressed by company executives, is to help customers reduce complexity, while improving overall simplicity and ensuring end-to-end efficiency, security and resilience.
Nutanix Strategy
For longtime VMware customers, Nutanix’ strategy is clear: leveraging customer migrations in their VMware hyperconverged systems – mapping the VMware workloads to current and future offers in Nutanix’ hybrid cloud and enterprise software. Other customers are looking for hybrid cloud and end-to-end software solutions that add reliability, security and consistent management to their extended on-prem and cloud-ready IT infrastructure.
Nutanix has a variety of software solutions to help customers expand their hybrid cloud deployments, including Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP), Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and Nutanix Central (NC) – soon available in an on-premises option – management capabilities. Details about the new product announcements are posted on the Nutanix .NEXT 2025 web-page.
The precipitating factor in VMware migrations was Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware in November, 2023, which is continuing to reverberate two years later, as customers decide whether to keep, to build, or to replace VMware. VMware, founded in 1998, had a full 25 years as an independent software supplier (ISV) – and had built up a large installed base across continents – estimated by IDC to be one of the largest software bases in the world.
While some customers will continue to be Broadcom customers using VMware VCF (also known (VMware Cloud Foundation), others will choose alternatives for hybrid cloud deployments. Examples include HCI solutions from Nutanix (Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure), HPE SimpliVity; and Microsoft Cloud (Azure Stack HCI). Other customers using Cisco HyperFlex and Dell VxRail will also be able to use Nutanix software for new deployments.
Given that many customers are global, with deployments in the Americas, Europe and Asia, mixed hybrid cloud implementations will likely be built – tapping several flavors of hyperconverged software across their deployments.
Nutanix is increasing its partnership with large cloud services providers (CSPs). The increasing presence of public-cloud solutions will make it easier for customers to deploy new cloud solutions rapidly, leveraging infrastructure offerings from Nutanix and its CSP partners. This a strong driver for closer partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. We note here that the Google Cloud solution, announced recently, will become generally available by year’s end.
Announcements
Among the NEXT25 announcements:
- Cloud-native AOS – which extends the Nutanix Cloud Platform to run with Kubernetes Everywhere (K8s Everywhere). This cloud-native solution is slated to become generally available this summer.
- Storage announcements, including partnerships for Pure Storage and Dell PowerFlex Example: the Nutanix-Pure Storage Integrated Solution for Mission-critical workloads.
- Expanded partnerships with systems vendors, including Cisco Systems, Dell Technologies, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Lenovo, among others.
- Expanded partnerships with AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure – and new announcements of support for Google Cloud.
- Expanded software partnerships, including Omnissa’s Horizon software (formerly VMware Horizon) for customers’ VDI desktop deployments, Citrix, and Canonical, which distributes Linux and open software. In the last year, Nutanix has also extended support and options for SAP HANA for new 2-socket and 4-socket systems, and Nutanix has certified new AOS and AV versions.
- Nutanix is enabling Agentic AI Anywhere, linking it to Nutanix Enterprise AI software. Through a partnership with NVIDIA, Nutanix software will have greater integration with NVIDIA’s AI development tools. This will become increasingly important as customers who began their AI use with GenAI are beginning to move into Agentic AI in-factory automation, and consumer-focused software solutions.
“We think long-term,” said Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami. “We’ve been serving you for the last 10 years or more – and we want to be a platform of choice for the long-term.” The conference drew a reported 5,000-plus attendees (May 7 – May 9, 2025), and nearly 90 partners said they were co-sponsoring exhibits at the event.
Large Nutanix customers include the John Deere farm-equipment company, which is moving from VMs to cloud-native; Moody’s Financial; Tractor Supply, a nationwide heavy-equipment distribution chain for agriculture; and Wells Fargo, which is deploying the NDB (Nutanix Database Service) solution, and the U.S. Navy, which is using hundreds of VDI desktops on two of its ocean-bound hospital ships. Nutanix executives said that the company gained 700 new customers per quarter in 2025.
Analysis
Nutanix’ strategy is to work with customers who are deploying hybrid cloud and data-center infrastructure that embraces the full spectrum of applications hosted on VMs, containers, and cloud services. This is important because many deployments were made in successive waves, over time, requiring customers to use multiple management software products – and multiple administrative skill-sets – for end-to-end solutions.
Nutanix is expanding its presence in enterprises with its ability to support scale-out and scale-up business workloads with AI/ML capabilities, expanded end-to-end security and a set of management capabilities with guardrails. Expanded storage support will be particularly important for growing AI workloads (models, and inference) and for migration of enterprise workloads, reducing the need for long-distance data transfers.
Known for its ability to build on existing VMware “footprints,” Nutanix software is providing a bridge to virtualized scale-out workloads in the enterprise data center. Nutanix is well-positioned to build on older VMware Tanzu development platforms, combining VMware-based server virtualization with Linux-based open systems via Kubernetes orchestration, supporting hyperconverged infrastructure and Red Hat OpenShift containers.
Nutanix infrastructure supports most types of storage, including the block, file and object formats, reflecting the diversity in customers’ current range of deployments. For many customer sites, the central focus is unified management across cloud, edge locations, and data centers, to reduce redundancy and inefficiency through a write-once, run-anywhere approach to customer IT.
Key Takeaways
Nutanix plans to grow in 2025-2026, tapping new HCI, AI and cloud opportunities as they emerge for new types of workloads. The rapid rate of change in traditional data centers, is blending HCI and virtualized environments with net-new cloud landscapes.
The .NEXT 2025 conference highlighted new applications that are being built with open-source software. This is significant because Kubernetes (K8s) and open-source software are the best-well-known software platforms for development of net-new enterprise applications.
Global companies, including large companies with thousands of employees and partners, are looking to blend “old” and “new” IT landscapes, allowing customers to deploy and use new applications alongside older ones.
Solving the management challenges of enterprise companies is a Nutanix business priority, because these customers seek to reduce operational costs while bringing important workloads online from a variety of old and new IT environments.
AI is the spark for many customers who are reinventing their IT infrastructure during an open-systems revolution around the world. Most companies are studying how to use AI – even if they are not utilizing it today. They are looking to AI as a technology that will quickly identify new business opportunities, while making their organization more flexible when implementing new business processes.
Building AI models, and deploying them for mission-critical uses, is important – as is anticipating a host of new inference “engines” that will use AI to achieve efficiencies for specific industries at the Edge of the network.
Nutanix clearly plans to “catch the wave” in AI/ML systems and open systems, so we are expecting Nutanix to invest in this rapidly emerging and profitable space for business – and to do so across geographic regions around the world.
