Nutanix .NEXT 2021 – HCI vendor aims squarely at hybrid/multi-cloud

In the decade since coming out of stealth. Nutanix has done more to create the HCI market than any other vendor, and remains one of its dominant players with 20,000-plus customers and $1.4 billion in revenue in its last fiscal year.

But like its main HCI software rival VMware, Nutanix can no longer rely on virtual machine-dominated on-premises technology as the IT world shifts to cloud and containerized applications. During Nutanix .NEXT 2021, the HCI pioneer moved to position itself as a hybrid and multi-cloud player. Just as it collapsed and simplified the traditional three-tier IT architecture into one tier, it now wants to make it easy to storage and manage data across on-premises, private clouds and public clouds – whether its customers are using hypervisors or Kubernetes.

Achieving simplicity is much more difficult across on-prem and multiple cloud deployments. That requires Nutanix to rely on a wide range of partnerships while narrowing the focus of its own products. It is already playing catch-up to VMware, which can run its software stack on all three major public clouds.

Nutanix is planning to streamline its 21 products into three portfolio bands:

• Cloud infrastructure, consisting of AOS, AHV, Flow, Karbon, networking and DR. These are products required to build a cloud.
• Cloud management, (operations, automation, governance, cost, self-service), or what is needed to operate a cloud.
• Services for managing storage and compute (Files, Objects, DBaaS/era, desktop services, End User Computing)

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