Look Back Ahead of .NEXT 2026

IT professionals return to Nutanix .NEXT year after year to recalibrate their strategic compass for enterprise infrastructure decisions and investment they make. The event is an industry barometer for what’s happening now and next in the world of IT. IT professional and industry experts attend the 2026 .NEXT event in Chicago to explore topics including the rise of agentic AI, hybrid multicloud IT innovations, data sovereignty and VM-container convergence. News and insights they gather help them plan budgets, align strategies meet leaders they can turn to for advice.

To preview the 2026 .NEXT in Chicago, Tarkan Maner, president and CCO of Nutanix sat for a video interview with theCube and explored enterprise AI execution, IT scalability and infrastructure resiliency in an increasingly AI-native environment. 

In preparation for 2026 .NEXT event in Chicago, this video looks back at some of the most significant topics that emerged at the 2025 .NEXT event, held in Washington DC

Video transcript:

Jason Lopez: .NEXT is more than just a trade show. This year in Chicago, the narratives driving. .NEXT 2026 include enterprise AI, hybrid multi-cloud, data sovereignty, and the convergence of VMs and containers are top of mind in the industry. At last year's .NEXT, the conversations that matter most were already taking shape. One of the big announcements at .NEXT 2025, a critical partnership between Nutanix and EverPure, last year known as Pure Storage, to address the rise of data-hungry AI computing.

Charles Giancarlo, CEO Everpure: We're announcing a new joint solution that combines the Nutanix cloud infrastructure with Pure Storage's industry-leading data storage and management platform.

Jason Lopez: Along with this news, Nutanix CEO, Rajiv Ramaswami, announced further collaborations that address the traditional complexity of multi-vendor IT deployments.

Rajiv Ramaswami: We've also come together with Cisco, Pure, and Nutanix to bring a fully validated solution to market that combines Cisco's UCS servers, unified compute servers, Cisco switches, the Nutanix cloud platform on Cisco UCS, combined together with Pure's flasheries. All these applications that you're running also need storage. They need app-centric storage. They need resilience. They need data protection, which is why we embarked on our journey to make AOS fully cloud native.

Jason Lopez: Cloud-native AOS, the most concrete expression yet of Nutanix's build once, run anywhere.

Rajiv Ramaswami: Now you have one enterprise platform across any environment, on- prem VMs, native clouds, cloud bare metal, and bare metal on- prem as well. What we are doing here is helping you manage across VMs and containers, providing you a common set of data services and common management in the mix. One experience to manage all of this anywhere.

Jason Lopez: At .NEXT 2025, Ramaswami talked about Nutanix's transition to a mature hybrid cloud AI native platform to include support and integration with Nvidia-based inference services.Rajiv Ramaswami: Today, we have evolved and I'm still to announce that we now have a full agentic AI platform. It's a production geared mission critical AI applications platform today. Now, we've expanded from just doing simple inferencing to providing you a full set of agentic frameworks and models. Our partnership with NVIDIA continues to expand. We now support the full NVIDIA AI for enterprise stack. That includes models, it includes frameworks, it includes tools for things like reasoning, which again, is a whole new development when it comes to AI. These reasoning models can be much more complex and do much more complex tasks for you, providing you guardrails in terms of governance and security, retrieval models, and more. And we're bringing it all together, making it really simple for you to build, run and govern these AI applications.

Now, what we provide within Nutanix platform very simply is at the end of the day, providing the level of automation and the user experience that you need to deploy and maintain and manage these agentic applications. Your data, your choice of model, your environment with role spaced access controls, all put together to enable you to run these AI applications. At the same time, we also realize that you may have multiple developers building multiple AI applications, and rather than having them replicate a set of individual AI services to meet the needs of their applications, we also provide a platform where all these services are available in a shared manner, whether it be the models or frameworks, all the stuff that we talked about, is can be shared across multiple users and application developers. And finally, we give you very predictable costs. Predictable costs, whether you're running this on- prem or in the public cloud. Our AI stack is available also in the public cloud on any underlying native Kubernetes surface. So that is what Nutanix AI is enabling you to do.