The State of IT is Moving to Trusted Vendors

Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami discusses IT trends and challenges in this brief video interview captured after his keynote at the Nutanix .NEXT 2025 event in Washington, DC.

He sees interest in migration turning into action as IT decision makers look for trusted vendors. He also talked about the rapid evolution of AI technologies and the maturing state of using hybrid multicloud environments strategically at scale.

Transcript:

Rajiv Ramaswami: Now it's time for us to look at the most modern or modern applications, AI. As the year progressed, we saw AI, generative AI evolving at a rapid clip. Here we've expanded from just doing simple inferencing to providing you a full set of age agent frameworks and models.

Jason Lopez: At the .Next 2025 conference in Washington DC, The Forecast caught up with CEO Rajiv Ramaswami after his keynote to briefly chat about technology and market trends.

Rajiv Ramaswami: If you're a customer, I think everybody wants to know about what's going on now? What are the trends? What's Nutanix doing? How can we help these days? Of course, top of mind topics for everybody is what's their future end state when it comes to a vendor that they can partner with for the long haul as they migrate away from their current solutions. So that's a very top of mind topic for everybody. And then we quickly get into a discussion of trends and where things are going for the future and how we can help them. For the longest time, VMware was the established infrastructure vendor for many of these companies. They've had 20-year-plus relationships with them, and I was in Japan, and I think there was a growing awareness two years ago. They weren't particularly concerned. Last year, they started getting concerned.

This year they're actually moving. For example, here at the show, we had Toshiba talk about how they're planning the migration away from Vme Nutanix. And you're seeing that, right? I mean, some of this is also from certain cultures. There's a lot of faith and trust built up over the years, and they want to work with somebody they can trust. So we are seeing a lot of that certainly happen over the last year. We've gone even in terms of what we've been able to bring to market and made tremendous progress. And it's still not mature. There's a lot going on every day, and I don't know what it's going to be. It was regular AI, generative AI, then agentic AI, I don't know what's coming next. Reasoning models came in recently. So this is rapidly evolving. I think hybrid cloud is pretty much established at this point.

Everybody realizes they're going to be operating in a multicloud environment with some workloads running in the data center, some at edges, some in the public cloud. So that model is very well established. And almost every customer I talk to has made these comparisons. They've looked at the cost of running in a public cloud, whether on-prem, they've looked at the security issues, all of those things, and they've decided that they'll figure out some things that were done in the public cloud, some and on-prem. So that's well established at this point. Now it's a matter of more executing on that at scale.