Embracing the Future of Hybrid Multicloud at .NEXT
By Rajiv Ramaswami, Nutanix President and CEO
Last week I attended my first in-person .NEXT. It was energizing and inspiring to meet so many customers and partners face-to-face in such a short amount of time. Our singular focus is to help solve the challenges our customers face on a daily basis, and hearing how our messaging and vision resonates was heartening.
We Understand the Challenge
The main drivers of modern business today are data and applications–every company is becoming a software company. The sheer volume of both applications and data are exploding, creating unimaginable sprawl. Couple that with the fact that applications and data don’t simply reside on premises or with a single, dedicated cloud provider. Today’s operating landscape is infinitely more complex with data and applications in multiple locations. We know you need to operate easily and seamlessly across multiple clouds, but that’s not yet the case. Each of these environments tend to operate in its own silo with different tools and different services, managed often by different teams. This adds cost and complexity. In addition, it’s hard to find the right talent to help manage all of this. Companies today need one open platform to run their data and applications anywhere.
Our History of Simplifying IT: Hyperconverged Infrastructure
Since our founding and at our core, we have always focused on simplifying infrastructure. We did this by breaking down silos in the data center by hyperconverging data, compute and storage. Now, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is the de facto standard for modern data centers.
The Nutanix HCI architecture does two things really well: First, it runs every workload with high performance, including the most mission-critical ones. Second, it scales to meet the needs of our smallest customers to our largest customers, some of whom are the largest companies in the world. In fact, Aspi Havewala, Global Head of Infrastructure Services and John Hayes, Director Tech Strategy, Digital Workplace Technology, from Verizon joined me on stage at .NEXT in Chicago to talk about how their organization is using Nutanix at scale to support over 130,000 virtual desktop users.
Since 2009, we have helped make the complexities of IT in the data center invisible. We focus on providing flexibility without vendor lock in. And we are dedicated to delighting our customers, even as we continue to scale our company. These three things: simplification, freedom of choice and delighting our customers are still at the heart of what we do today.
Today: Extending to the Cloud with Hybrid Multicloud
We may be known for pioneering HCI. Now we’re building on the simplified foundation of HCI, giving our customers one open platform where they can run their data and applications, including mission critical applications, anywhere they want––on prem data centers, the public cloud, or even at the edge.
Hybrid multicloud environments have become the preferred IT model. According to our annual Enterprise Cloud Index survey of IT professionals around the world, the majority (60%) of IT teams leverage more than one IT infrastructure, whether it is a mix of private and public clouds, multiple public clouds, or an on-premises datacenter along with a hosted datacenter. That number is expected to grow to nearly three quarters (74%) in the near future. Not surprisingly, 94% say they'd benefit from having a single, unified place to manage applications and data across their diverse environments. That’s where Nutanix can really help. We enable companies to operate across their data center and multiple clouds more efficiently so they can run their applications anywhere.
Today we deliver a cloud platform that gives our customers a consistent operating model not only on our own platform, but across multiple public clouds as well as the edge.
This new hybrid multicloud world presents its own set of challenges such as cloud migration, simplifying operations and managing cloud costs. In fact, you don't need Nutanix software on prem to benefit from Nutanix solutions. Nick Mahlitz, Senior digital Infrastructure Manager of Forestry and Land Scotland joined me on stage at .NEXT in Chicago to talk about their cloud strategy and how Nutanix is helping them achieve their cloud-first vision while also helping them save money.
We also announced two major innovations, currently under development, related to hybrid multicloud management including new capabilities in the Nutanix Cloud Platform to enable customers to integrate data management of containerized and virtualized applications on-premises, on public cloud, and at the edge (including comprehensive data services for Kubernetes applications as well as cross-cloud data mobility.) We also announced Nutanix Central, a cloud to edge management solution, extending universal cloud operating model to consistently run apps and data anywhere. I loved the positive feedback from customers and partners on our news!
Our Vision for the Future
I am proud about the history we have had in creating a category that has made life simpler for our nearly 24,000 customers around the world and the fantastic innovation news we had, but we’re not stopping there. Our culture of innovation and focus on meeting our customers' needs will continue to open new opportunities for us to do more.
We provide our customers with a full-fledged infrastructure platform that cuts across any operating environment whether it’s private cloud, public cloud, including bare metal or edge deployments.. To serve our customers’ needs in the future, we will enable companies to build applications once and run them natively on any platform…anywhere.
We announced that we will do this by developing a set of managed platform services so that our customers can build an application once using standard container platforms, along with platform services to make those applications fully portable. This is what we are calling Project Beacon, and it’s a multi-year effort to deliver a portfolio of data-centric Platform as a Service (PaaS) level services available natively anywhere, including on Nutanix or natively on public cloud. With a vision of decoupling the application and its data from the underlying infrastructure, Project Beacon aims to enable developers to build applications once and run them anywhere.
Tobias Ternstrom, our GM for Platform Services, joined me on the .NEXT stage to give a demonstration of what this looks like. Tobias showed us what it would look like to run Nutanix Database Solution natively in public cloud through Project Beacon and we talked about how each app needs a data-oriented platform service. You can imagine more solutions in the future: messaging, caching, or search. This is the future through which we will deliver on the vision for enabling customers to run an application natively in any of the clouds and be able to have complete portability.
What’s NEXT?
At .NEXT we showcased where we’ve been, where we are now and where we are going in the future. Our customers were fully engaged at .NEXT, as highlighted by Nutanix CMO Mandy Dhaliwal, which is a testament to our continued focus on understanding their needs, delivering exceptional solutions, and supporting their success. We pioneered simplicity and hyperconvergence of the data center, which is still the gold standard for data center modernization. More recently, we’ve broken down silos between clouds––private, public and edge––to enable a consistent operating platform to serve today’s reality of a hybrid multicloud infrastructure. And now we’re developing capabilities to enable companies to build applications natively in the cloud and run or move them anywhere.
If you weren’t able to join us in person, I hope you will watch the replay or find us during our .NEXT “On Tour” experience in locations around the world, coming soon.
We are here to make hybrid multicloud simple so that our customers can focus on accelerating their business outcomes for years to come.
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