Day 1 of Nutanix .Next 2025 – Washington DC is upon us!
A short walk across the road from the hotel is the Walter E. Washington Convention Center where the conference is taking place this year. .
The opening Keynote delivered by Mandy Dhaliwal (Chief Marketing Officer, Nutanix), and Rajiv Ramaswami (Chief Executive Officer, Nutanix) did not disappoint, lots of doubling down on previous announcements around simplifying platforms, introducing external storage, and a heavy play on AI.
Playing on loop before the keynote was the Nutanix Technology Champion 2025 list, a group of folks I’m incredibly fortunate to collaborate with and with approximately 40 of us in attendance, there’s been a lot of discussion!
The Keynote focused on:
- MoreSeamless Management
- MoreSecurity
- MoreContainers
- MoreLLMs
- MoreAgentic AI
- MoreClouds
- MoreApplications
- MorePartnerships
A whole lot MOREwas the message, building upon relationships, evolving the ecosystem, & aiming to be the one platform to rule them all.
Whilst I’m still getting over the GA of External Storage with Dell PowerFlex, Rajiv announces a partnership with Pure Storage to do the same there with external storage, but with a difference… the advent of a new solution ‘FlashStack with Nutanix‘ – the marriage of Nutanix on Cisco, and Pure Storage.
Moving on Rajiv pivoted to talking about Omnissa, a conference Platinum Sponsor, and the recently spun off ex VMware EUC platform notably Horizon bringing Nutanix AHV support in the near future. Everyone is glad to see this arrive. Find the Omnissa announcement here and the link to their beta sign up here
Next up is great news for the dark sites, the benefits of the Nutanix SaaS products coming to on-prem… sadly missing was Security Central here, but hopefully it will come soon.
Next up was the announcement of NC2 on GCP, completing the traditional Hyperscaler trifecta.
Recapping, Rajiv explored Project Beacon an initiative that began over 2 years ago in helping make Nutanix’s vision come true in ‘Build Once, Run Anywhere‘
With the announcement of Cloud Native AOS suddenly the ability to consume AOS natively as a containerised service provision within AWS, there was a definite ‘hold my beer‘ moment with the announcement of Cloud Native AOS on bare metal suddenly there’s the ability to deploy AOS on edge without the usual constraints.
Phew, a busy keynote session of technical announcements.
There were then some customer testimonials with a heavy influence on migration, Move is being turbo-charged to do more, quicker including the future migration of NSX-T / other firewall rules into Flow, and in-place migrations to reduce swing kit requirements.
Stepping sideways, after the technical keynote there was a vibrant and frank discussion with Chef José Andrés and his awe-inspiring World Central Kitchen initiative.
What will day two bring?