After a rather busy first day, I took advantage of the time difference to be at the convention center as soon as it opened to make the most of the second day.
This allowed me to spend some time with my NTC colleagues in the Community Lounge over coffee while waiting for the keynote!
The motto: demos, a few announcements, and more demos!
Lee Caswel kicked off the keynote by thanking all the event’s partners and welcoming us to .NEXT 2025.
He then quickly went on to summarize the first day, including support for Dell Powerflex and Pure Storage external storage, the Omnissa VDI solution, AOS cloud native, and Agentic AI.
Today’s keynote program:
- Modern Hybrid Cloud
- Simplicity at Scale
- Air Gapped Cyber Resilience
- Cloud Native Anywhere
Lee is then joined on stage by Thomas Cornely, who takes over for a series of demos.
Modern Hybrid Cloud
We’re used to it: the queen of demos, Laura Jordana, joins Thomas on stage to give us a first demonstration of the integration of Dell Powerflex with Nutanix.
The wow factor:
- 3-click integration
- Direct access to the PowerFlex console from Prism
- Demonstration of a workload migration via Move to a Dell PowerFlex cluster
Simple, fast, and effective, the demo allowed us to see how amazingly simple it is to integrate Dell Powerflex into a Nutanix environment.
To avoid creating jealousy, the same demo was performed for Pure Storage and the same conclusion was reached: it’s simple, fast, and effective!
Barely time to catch our breath, Laura continues with a demonstration of Omnissa Horizon 8 on AHV and the demonstration alone made me want to test the solution… I’ll have to wait until this summer to access the beta but stay tuned!
Finally, the last demonstration of this first part focused on the support of Flow Virtual Networking on Google Cloud for seamless migration between on-prem and GC infrastructure.
Simplicity at Scale
Laura Jordana gives up her place on stage to Artur Krzywdzinski who will deliver the Simplicity at Scale portion of the keynote.
And it starts with centralized management thanks to Nutanix Central!
Automated deployment with zero-touch provisioning, multi-cluster updates via LCM, it’s all there! Or how to revolutionize the management and administration of our Nutanix environments in a single interface! It’s a dream, believe me!
Air Gapped Cyber Resilience
Jason Burns takes Artur’s place on stage to talk about security, particularly in isolated environments. We’re starting with Flow Network Security, featuring its “Next Gen” version in Flow Virtual Networks!
But security doesn’t stop there, and snapshots also benefit from two innovations:
- immutable snapshots in NUS Files
- multi-cloud snapshots in NUS Objects bunker
A new version of Data Lens on-prem, capable of detecting threats in under 6 minutes, was also announced for the end of 2025.
Cloud Native Anywhere
Without transition, we’ll move on to José Gomez on stage, who will talk to us about fleet management on the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform, which allows you to centralize updates and simplify provisioning!
Agentic AI
It was then Ashwini Vasanth’s turn to give us a demonstration of agentic AI, including the translation of an uploaded document into several languages and the verification of the conformity (tone, language, compliance with codes, etc.) of an uploaded video.
This demonstration was truly amazing because everything happened almost instantly!
Express Certification!
I signed up to revalidate my Unified Storage 6.10 certification, and I must say it was a breeze, as I was able to earn my certification in just 26 minutes! Obviously, the main reason was that I didn’t want to miss the last keynote of the show…
The Final Keynote
For the final keynote of the event, Tarkan Manner kicked off the show with thanks to the various sponsors before handing over to Evy Pompouras, a former Secret Service agent, who gave us a talk on communication and how to use it to maintain control during discussions.
A very interesting topic, during which she offered a wealth of advice on how to improve our verbal and non-verbal communication.
Finally, the long-awaited moment of the last keynote arrived: the announcement of the next destination for .NEXT!
Chicago has therefore been chosen to host the next edition of the event, which will take place from April 7 to 9, 2026!
Nutanix .NEXT Party
Since a .NEXT without a .NEXT Party isn’t really a .NEXT, the publisher organized an impressive closing party as usual.
DJs, bars, buffets… There were even stands where you could get a temporary tattoo or even get a cap personalized by graffiti artists!
Unfortunately, the evening often ends around 9 p.m., but we didn’t let it get us down! We went out for one last meal with the entire Mikadolabs team, the Nodelink and HYCU teams, and even Brad, one of my NTC colleagues!
