After a rather short night due to the previous evening and jet lag, I set off for the Washington Convention Center for the launch of the first day of Nutanix .NEXT 2025.

NTCs! Gathering!

The first mission was to find a coffee, a large coffee, a very large coffee, because I already knew it was going to be a long day… Once I had my precious coffee, I headed straight to the Nutanix Technology Champions’ meeting point: the Community Lounge.

I had the pleasure of meeting Angelo, Jeroen, Brad, Jason, Avi, Kim, Bart, Angela, and many others there, with whom we were able to make sure that everyone had a good trip, discuss the 3 days to come, exchange our stickers specially designed for the occasion, which allowed us to pass the time until the time came for the Keynote…

WELCOME TO .NEXT 2025 !!!

Traditionally, the first .NEXT keynote is the one that reveals the majority of the publisher’s big announcements, and this edition was no exception!

To kick off the show, we were able to count on Mandi Dhaliwal who, after warmly thanking the event’s sponsors, quickly handed over to Rajiv Ramaswami, CEO of Nutanix.

After a short introduction in which he presented himself with his muscular starter pack boosted with AI, .NEXT 2025 was officially launched and the keynote could really get started with the following announcements and their dedicated articles:

• DELL and Pure Storage external storage support
• End User Computing : here come a new challenger !
• Nutanix Central : One On-premise place to rule them all !
• Nutanix Move, stats and new features
• it’s a MultiCloud and Containers World
• Agentic AI, the rise of the machines

Keynote #1: Closing Clap

Once all the technical announcements had been made, Rajiv Ramaswami handed the stage over to Mandy Dhaliwal, who, with undisguised pleasure, welcomed Chef José Andres. With his trademark sense of humor, he spoke to us about his personal vision of the values ​​Nutanix embodies: Hungry, Humble, Honest, and with Heart.

Making a decision, whether good or bad, is always better than not making a decision at all – José Andres

He also told us about his work against world hunger through his organization “World Central Kitchen” and his various activities (writing books, opening restaurants, television shows, etc.).

Once the keynote was over, I rushed out to grab a quick meal before heading off to my certification…

Certification: NCM MCI 6.10 Beta, a Real Mess

Scheduled for 1:10 PM, nothing was ready! The examiners hadn’t anticipated the workstation preparation and had to do it urgently using USB drives…

I had to wait until 2:10 PM before being able to start the exam, and I wasn’t done with the surprises… Between the missing information in the statements, the information that was present but unclear, the various typos, the missing features in the interface (local account management on Prism Central, for example), and even the licensing issues… I think for a beta, it lived up to its name!

I won’t have the results until August, so stay tuned, but don’t expect much!

End of the Day

We ended the day in the exhibitor hall with drinks and some canapés at the OVHcloud booth. We then headed to the Nutanix EMEA evening, where we met partners and competitors in a rather pleasant setting.

The volume being quite high, we ended up changing locations to go to Jaleo, the restaurant of chef… José Andres! We were able to share tapas and drinks there before finally returning to our respective hotels to regain some strength for the 2nd day…