WASHINGTON — At its flagship .NEXT 2025 conference, Nutanix made a series of sweeping announcements aimed at hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure, with a sharp focus on artificial intelligence, Kubernetes innovation and high-profile partnerships.
The three-day event, held in the American capital, drew over 5,000 attendees and showcased the company’s ambition to simplify complex IT environments while capitalising on the industry‘s shift towards agentic AI and cloud-native agility.
One of the most significant announcements was the launch of Cloud Native AOS, a hypervisor-free iteration of Nutanix’s core storage software designed to run natively on Kubernetes clusters.
Senior executive said that this solution extends enterprise-grade data resilience—think disaster recovery and seamless migration—to containerised applications across public clouds and bare-metal environments.
Thomas Cornely, Nutanix’s SVP of Product Management, framed it as a response to the “missing link” in hybrid cloud architectures: consistent data management for stateful Kubernetes workloads.
Early adopters like Networld and Bacher Systems praised the platform’s ability to unify storage operations across Amazon EKS, on-premises deployments and edge locations. “It facilitates data migration and disaster recovery in ways previously limited to virtualized infrastructure,” said Issei Tsuruzono, Corporate Officer and Head of Technology Division of Networld.
The solution, now in early access for AWS, is slated for general availability by summer (June-August) 2025, with bare-metal support expected by year-end.
AI Gets Agentic
Nutanix doubled down on AI with a major update to its Enterprise AI (NAI) platform, integrating NVIDIA’s NIM inference microservices and NeMo framework. The company stressed that the collaboration enables enterprises to deploy “agentic” AI systems—autonomous models capable of planning and reasoning across multi-cloud environments.
A shared model service architecture reduces GPU resource strain by allowing multiple applications to reuse centralised LLM endpoints, while built-in guardrails prevent prompt injection attacks.
Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami underscored the pragmatic appeal: “Customers don’t want to train models from scratch. They need a fast path to deploying optimised AI applications with their private data”.
The offering positions Nutanix as a bridge between raw infrastructure and AI orchestration, supporting everything from hyperconverged setups to CNCF-certified Kubernetes distributions.
Strategic Alliances
In a move that surprised industry watchers, Nutanix announced a landmark partnership with Pure Storage, marrying its AHV hypervisor and Flow networking with Pure’s FlashArray over NVMe/TCP. The deal, teased as “classified” ahead of the event, targets VMware refugees seeking alternatives after Broadcom’s acquisition upheaval.
Ramaswami quipped, “If you’d asked me years ago if Pure and Nutanix would collaborate, I’d have laughed.” The solution enters early access this summer.
Meanwhile, the Dell PowerFlex integration reached general availability, allowing Nutanix’s software to manage external storage arrays—a first for the traditionally hyperconverged vendor.
Cisco joined the fray with FlashStack for Nutanix, a pre-validated stack combining Cisco UCS servers, Pure Storage arrays and Nutanix’s cloud platform. These alliances reflect a broader strategy to offer customers “choice without compromise,” as Ramaswami put it.
Nutanix also unveiled the public preview of Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Google Cloud, completing its hyperscaler trifecta after AWS and Azure. The offering helps enterprises deploy Nutanix’s stack on Google’s Z3 bare-metal instances, enabling lift-and-shift migrations and consistent operations across clouds.
“Same software, same licenses—now across all major providers,” Ramaswami said. Elastic SAN support for Azure and multi-site snapshotting were among other NC2 enhancements highlighted.
Security and Compliance
With cyber threats looming larger, Nutanix expanded its security partnerships to align with NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0. New integrations with Qualys, Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike aim to simplify compliance while hardening defences across data, identity, and network layers.
The announcements collectively advance Nutanix’s view of “run anything, anywhere.” By decoupling AOS from hypervisors, embracing AI agentics, and forging unlikely alliances, the company is betting big on hybrid multi-cloud as the default enterprise architecture. Analysts like IDC’s Dave Pearson see Cloud Native AOS as a “groundbreaking” step toward closing Kubernetes’ enterprise readiness gaps.
Yet challenges remain. Rivals like VMware (now under Broadcom) and Red Hat are doubling down on similar turf, while economic headwinds could slow cloud migration budgets. Nutanix’s response seems to be hinging on a partner-heavy, modular approach that lets customers mix and match—a strategy as much about pragmatism as innovation.
