Packing your bags for Silicon Valley always feels special, even for a Nutanix Technology Champion. Tomorrow morning, Saturday, October 24th at 6:30 AM, I am flying out of Lyon Saint-Exupéry. After a short layover at Amsterdam Schiphol, where I will meet up with my fellow European NTC friends and colleagues (Jeroen Tielen, Patrick Damen, Bart Donders, and Jonas Hogman), we will cross the Atlantic together on the same flight to San Francisco before heading to our hotel in San Jose. The goal? Two days at Nutanix headquarters for NTC Tech Connect, an exclusive event masterfully orchestrated by Angelo Luciani. With an agenda almost 100% focused on Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) and Artificial Intelligence (NAI), I am taking you behind the scenes of this journey to the heart of the Nutanix ecosystem.

From Lyon to Silicon Valley: The Community Spirit of the Nutanix Technology Champions (NTC)

Beyond the eleven-hour flight awaiting us between Amsterdam and California, this kind of trip perfectly illustrates what I love about the NTC (Nutanix Technology Champion) program: its human and community-driven dimension. Sharing this transatlantic journey with experts like Jeroen, Patrick, Bart, and Jonas already turns the flight into a mini technical summit at 35,000 feet.

However, NTC Tech Connect is neither a reward trip nor a marketing keynote. It is an intense technical immersion, under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), designed by Angelo Luciani for a handpicked group of NTCs to build a direct bridge between the field and the engineering teams in San Jose. Our role as NTCs is not just to listen to the roadmap: it is above all to challenge Product Managers and Distinguished Engineers with our realities as architects, our production constraints, and the concrete use cases of our European customers.

Immersion at Nutanix HQ: Two Days at the Heart of the Cloud Native and AI Strategy

Starting Monday morning, we will dive into two packed days at Nutanix headquarters. Without revealing the specific details of the agenda, the common thread of this edition is crystal clear: supporting modern applications and industrializing AI across our hybrid infrastructures.

Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP): Architecture, Security, and Resilience at Scale

The first major part of our discussions will be dedicated to Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP). For those following the evolution of the ecosystem, NKP is the answer from Nutanix to simplifying and industrializing Kubernetes cluster management, whether on-premises or in the cloud. We are going to dive deep into deployment topology best practices, architectural resilience, and above all, security management at fleet scale. When you have to manage dozens of clusters in production, Day 2 operations and observability become the true critical topics.

Accelerating on AI: From Product Vision to Inference with Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI)

The other major pillar of this Tech Connect is obviously Artificial Intelligence, and more specifically how it runs on NKP. Far from being just a buzzword, the challenge is to understand how to run AI workloads in a pragmatic, secure, and high-performing way. The planned sessions with the product teams will allow us to dissect Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI) from the perspective of inference and workflow orchestration (especially around Agent Gateway concepts). This is exactly where the current challenge lies: offering enterprises a turnkey platform to consume AI models without adding complexity to the underlying infrastructure.

Conclusion: The Human Adventure and What’s Next on the Blog

Beyond the intense technical sessions, this NTC Tech Connect is also a true human adventure. The community evenings planned in San Jose will be the ideal opportunity to extend our discussions over a drink and compare feedback from our respective projects. It is often during these passionate exchanges that the best ideas are born!

My return flight will take off from San Francisco on Wednesday, October 28th, landing back in Lyon on Thursday afternoon, October 29th. Once I have recovered from the jet lag and sorted through my notes (filtering out everything that remains under NDA), I will see you very soon on the blog for a complete debriefing of what was shared with us. Until then, feel free to follow me on X (Twitter) and LinkedIn, where I will be sharing some live behind-the-scenes moments from this Californian trip!