Nutanix CEO Stokes Surge in IT Ecosystem Partnerships

Innovation and growth are increasingly a product of collective intelligence and synergistic efforts. It’s evident in the acceleration of IT ecosystem partnerships in recent years aimed at meeting evolving business needs, especially as more attention and investment pours into artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.

In this Tech Barometer podcast, follow Nutanix President and CEO Rajiv Ramaswami as he walks between meetings at his company’s .NEXT conference in Washington, DC, held in early May 2025. It’s where he announced new and expanding partnerships with technology leaders, including AI chip titan Nvidia, hardware manufacturer Dell, cloud service providers AWS and Google Cloud, and data management company Pure Storage.

“It all comes down to can we work together to create something of value that each of us brings together and create a solution and experience for the customer,” Ramaswami said. “That is the core of every partnership.”

From above, the .NEXT conference looked like a mad rush of traffic through city streets during rush hour. Thousands of people dashed from one technical briefing to another panel discussion then funneled into the theater for grand keynote presentations. The energy was palpable as participants networked and feasted on new innovations that could benefit their company and boost their IT careers. 

Gaining a competitive edge increasingly comes from building trusted relationships and deeper collaboration with the right mix of leaders. The Nutanix CEO sees this happening with customers that attended the event.

“It's across all the themes that we talked about: modernizing infrastructure, building cloud native applications, enabling enterprise AI, and depending on the partner specifically, it's one or all of these vectors,” Ramaswami told The Forecast at .NEXT.

What’s Driving More IT Ecosystem Partnerships?

Innovation thrives when diverse players come together, and integrated ecosystems can amplify this effect, according to David Flower, President and CEO at Volt Active Data, Inc. 

“By collaborating with tech partners – cloud providers, AI innovators, data platform vendors, software vendors and hardware manufacturers – companies can create synergies that enable them to innovate faster and unlock more value than they otherwise could on their own,” Flower wrote in an April 2025 Forbes Council article. 

In 2024, global enterprise services firm KPMG surveyed 258 U.S. leaders at companies with revenue of $1 billion or more. Ninety-four percent of respondents believed their partner ecosystem enables future growth. KPMG survey results also showed that the complexity of generative AI is impacting partnership strategies.

“By collaborating with the right partners, organizations can leverage industry expertise, access resources, and foster innovation, ultimately positioning themselves for long-term success,” said Todd Lohr, head of Ecosystems and National Operations Leader for Advisory Markets at KPMG LLP. “Ecosystem partnerships will be critical to achieving growth, competitive advantage, and business resilience.”

CIOs and their IT teams work with a wide variety of complex technologies, including their own hyperconverged data centers that connect with one or more cloud services. Many rely on a variety of storage and database technologies that interconnect with various applications, including business critical and cloud-native-designed AI applications. By assembling and evolving their IT operations, IT teams rely on a particular mix of vendors with specialized knowledge and capabilities that interoperate. APIs and open standards make it easier for different systems and services to connect and interact, often paving the way for technology integrations that meet an IT team’s strategy and business needs.

Benefits of a Thriving IT Ecosystem

Growth and expansion of partnerships across the IT ecosystems of hardware, software and service providers relies on collaboration aimed at creating valuable solutions for customers, particularly in areas like enterprise AI and cloud-native applications. 

“This is creating a huge value for customers,” Ramaswami said. “They know that we can't provide everything and so combining solutions together, we can make it work well.”

Ken Kaplan: Yeah, the theme for me is partners and Pure Storage was a big announcement. What is it like to work with NVIDIA, Dell, all these partners you've been talking about for years, but you're really close with them now.

Rajiv Ramaswami: It all comes down to can we work together to create something of value that each of us brings together and create a solution for the customer. That is the core of every partnership. You look at NVIDIA, it's all about enabling enterprise AI. If you look at Pure, it's about providing customers with choice. Many of the large install base of customers out there with Pure Storage and now they all have an option to be working together with the Nutanix Cloud Platform and Pure. It's all about providing a better solution and experience for customers.

Ken Kaplan: There was Cisco, Dell, NVIDIA. What's driving all this togetherness now? Is it a push for AI? Is it a push that there's really a lot of innovation and we got to get together on the same page? Why is this happening now?

Rajiv Ramaswami: It's across all the themes that we talked about. Modernizing infrastructure, building cloud native applications, enabling enterprise AI, and depending on the partner specifically, it's one or all of these vectors.

Ken Kaplan: Do you anticipate more of this happening or does this thing start to close up or are we in a real open go, go, go period?

Rajiv Ramaswami: We've always been a company that's focused on creating a platform and a platform always has an ecosystem around it. I do expect our ecosystem to continue to grow and flourish. Do you see the customers wanting this kind of openness? Absolutely. This is creating a huge value for customers because they know that we can't provide everything and so combining solutions together, if we can make it work well, yes, absolutely.

Ken Kaplan: Have you seen some of the customers, once they have these capabilities, start going in new directions? You mentioned a customer who came on stage with you and now they're getting into AI.

Rajiv Ramaswami: Their needs are evolving as well. They may have been running traditional infrastructure stuff on us. They may have been running VDI workloads on us. They're running mission critical databases on us these days. Now they're running AI on us. Their needs evolve and we as a platform continue to work hard to evolve with them.