Nutanix held its .NEXT event in London (UK) on November 26, 2025.
The company’s fierce focus on customer satisfaction has driven its customer pipeline to the point that the 30,000 mark is now tantalisingly close.
Born 16 years ago, Nutanix started off as an appliance company and created the technology category called hyper converged infrastructure (HCI), which collapses three tier architectures into a single logical platform.
The company’s vision from the start was to provide a consumer-like experience in the enterprise space: to enable customers to manage their ecosystem easily and seamlessly, focusing on a “one click” concept, and offering choice and flexibility that avoids lock-in. A seamless management platform means the user experience is the same wherever the customer is managing applications: at the edge, in the core data center, or in the public cloud.
In the public cloud, Nutanix has partnerships with Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. Although Virtual Machines (VMs) are going to be around for a long time, the market is moving in a direction taking enterprises towards modern architectures. This year saw Nutanix launching its container platform with Acropolis Operating System (AOS) to highlight the fact that data is now distributed across more applications and types of infrastructure than ever. The Nutanix Cloud Native AOS solution extends the Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK) and Nutanix’s NKP (Nutanix Kubernetes Platform). Another key announcement this year was the partnership with Pure Storage, helping Nutanix provide more choice for current VMware/Broadcom customers seeking to flee the platform but whose requirements include external storage.
Nutanix support
Several companies took to the stage to talk about the quality of support offered by Nutanix. Michael Doherty, Head of Global Infrastructure at Renesas Electronics, described his journey towards a virtual platform that started with a SimpliVity solution by HPE, but ended with the goal to have a more flexible platform built from the ground up, which led the company to Nutanix AHV (Acropolis Hypervisor).
Doherty explained that the support they received meant moving workloads with no issues at all, although this entailed a large volume of workloads in a big organisation like Renesas Electronics with 25,000 employees. He clarified the occurrence of problems is a reality in modern infrastructure, but Nutanix support enabled them to speak with someone who understood the problem, without having to go through several lines of support to talk to the person who can solve the issue. Picking up the phone and finding the first person on the line who can immediately handle the issue is a significant hurdle with other vendors.
Migration process
Another customer, Day Lewis Pharmacies, took to the stage to elaborate on the migration process from a previous virtualised platform onto Nutanix. The pharmacy has 240 sites in the UK. Taking the leap of faith of moving from a familiar environment onto a new platform entails risk. However, moving to Nutanix is a simple process, described during the event as involving the click of a button, by selecting specific virtual machines, clicking “move”. The customer presentation included information about the migration process: Nutanix has a migration product called Move, and customers throughout the day highlighted its usefulness and ease of use. The Move appliance can, for example, help an organisation migrating from a VMware environment onto AHV by Nutanix, with the goal of having a seamless experience. In the case of Day Lewis Pharmacies, the process involved the migration of 270 VMs, some of which were quite large at around six terabytes. The simplicity of the migration process was highlighted.
Choice is the future for Nutanix
Nutanix aims to highlight the choice element for customers, be it choice of hardware, Hypervisor, or public cloud. The company wants to continue to offer customers choice, which means it is possible to use ESXi on a Nutanix platform. Although the vast majority – over 80% – of customers go on to migrate onto AHP, Nutanix still keeps providing the option, all the while describing the ease of migrating to continue enticing VMware and Microsoft users.
Over the next 12 months, Nutanix will be targeting customers who are disgruntled with VCF 9 transitions. Another topic of importance was that external storage will entail breaking with the HCI paradigm. By partnering with Pure Storage, Cisco and Dell Technologies, Nutanix aims to offer customers optionality going forward.
The TCO (total cost of ownership) discussion is also of the highest importance: the price point of the software and sometimes new hardware involved. Looking at the broader TCO conversation, Nutanix claims it can show prospects a cost model that can demonstrate that, over a period of time (typically five years), the TCO will work out well, with guarantees for the future and the inclusion of a renewal price clause during the period of the customer license, to avoid surprises as might have been the case with other vendors and transparency on the product roadmap.
