Trip report: Nutanix .NEXT 2026

Disclosure: the following is offered purely for informational purposes. It is 100% independent analysis without any form of remuneration (noting that Virtified was an invited guest).

Over the years I had been invited to attend Nutanix .NEXT many times. At long last, in 2026 I was able to attend the event for the first time. Here's my trip report, for your information.

Momentum

• Over 5,000 onsite attendees and more than 100 sponsors^.

• A high level of audience engagement within the breakout sessions I attended...with large groups of attendees seeking extra details from the speakers.

• Expanding partner and alliance ecosystem. Only a few years ago it would have been unthinkable to have NetApp and Nutanix onstage together but in 2026 it builds on top of Nutanix's expanding relationships with the likes of Dell and Everpure (previously Pure Storage). It is also demonstration of the evolution of Nutanix's strategy.

As a life long fan of the Blues Brothers, it was great to get to the House of Blues alongside admiring the local architecture.

Announcements

I wouldn’t necessarily say that any of the announcements were revolutionary...but I would say several demonstrated gradual evolutionary advancement.

Top takeaways from me:

• Expanding hardware compatibility list, which will make it easier for new customers to migrate. By supporting additional servers, depreciation schedules and hardware refresh become less of an obstacle for organisations wishing to migrate to Nutanix.

• Incremental product improvements across the portfolio including Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI), Nutanix Database Service (NDB) and Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS). These showcase an IT infrastructure vendor that has moved from solving a specific problem toward offering a ‘stack’.

• Platform philosophy: Virtified’s position is that the majority of enterprises are hybrid and multicloud. They will continue to have on- and off-prem workloads, running physical and virtual, operating from the most remote locations all the way to centralised hyperscale. Nutanix calls this ‘run anywhere’; Virtified calls it a pragmatic necessity.

The big surprise: open source

I may be cynical sceptical on occasion, I confess, so it was a surprise to rectify some incorrect assumptions.

Although not an open source company, I was surprised to learn of Nutanix’s contributions to projects such as KVM, QEMU and Libvirt. You could argue that that’s the least Nutanix could do…but the reality is that it isn’t.

You can argue that isn't a high bar to jump and that it 'damns them with faint praise', as the saying goes. I'm not an open source lawyer but they are not obligated to contribute and could do less if they wanted—as is the behaviour with some vendors. Perhaps I'm overcompensating for having assumed they didn't contribute. Irrespective, and even though that was not even the reality in the past, acquiring the assets of D2iQ makes Nutanix more intertwined in the open source community, including the CNCF ecosystem and projects such as Kubernetes, Cilium and others.

I got the feeling there is some interest within product teams to make Nutanix’s position clearer. I’d encourage that – a moderate search found nothing substantial that I could refer to (beyond some of my crappy photos taken in breakout sessions).

Nutanix should work to make their position on open source clearer.

One more thing...

Just like the conversations about open source, there was general acknowledgement of the fact that Nutanix Community Edition can be more of a detriment than a benefit. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the problem is known, acknowledged and should be addressed in coming months.

The sooner the better, in my opinion.

Notes:

Keynotes are available at https://www.nutanix.com/next/on-demand.

I imagine that (some) breakout sessions will be published online at some point. A cursory scan didn't find any yet.

^ I didn’t count attendees or sponsor booths but it looked about right so I’ll take Nutanix’s word for it.