Nutanix is expanding its focus on agentic AI, with announcements including a full-stack agentic AI offering, partnerships with AMD and Nvidia, certified integration with MongoDB, expanded collaboration with Cisco, and support for NetApp ONTAP at its .NEXT 2026 conference in Chicago.
“We are rapidly moving from an era of prompting, where you can all sit there and prompt your favourite bot, or your favourite model, to the era of delegating and enabling autonomy with AI agents,” Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said in his keynote.
According to him, the competitive edge is no longer just about the data that organisations have, but the autonomy they can enable with that data.
Agentic era
First announced during Nvidia GTC 2026, Nutanix’s Agentic AI offering is intended to support enterprises in building and operating AI applications on the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP). Currently in early access, the offering includes a virtualisation foundation for AI infrastructure and integrates compute, storage, networking, and Kubernetes services. It is expected to be available in the second half of 2026.
“As the data comes in, we also transform it into intelligence. We process and extract and vectorise that data so that your AI applications can consume it. All of these are validated with Nvidia,” Ramaswami said.
Additionally, the company introduced Nutanix Service Provider Central, also in early access. It adds multi-tenancy capabilities that allow service provider partners to deliver hosted infrastructure and AI services on NCP, while maintaining logical isolation between tenants sharing the same infrastructure.
“For example, even if you enter price, you will want your HR agents to be kept separated from your finance agents. If you’re a service provider, every tenant or customer needs to be isolated from the other. We have now included a full suite of multi-tenancy capabilities, while allowing you to access and share common infrastructure with the security, compliance, and guardrails required to support this,” he said.
Internally, Ramaswami said AI has had the biggest impact on their engineering.
“Across the software development lifecycle, everything from defining product requirements to design, to coding, to testing — AI is having a significant impact. Our developers are all enabled with AI tools these days, and the vast majority of them are very literate now and are using those tools. We think we can target something like a 20% productivity improvement per developer. What that means effectively is we can get 20% more feature content out on a release basis using the same-sized team, so now it’s up to us to decide what we do with that productivity gain,” he told journalists in a separate briefing.
AMD investment
Earlier this year, AMD and Nutanix announced a multi-year agreement to jointly develop an open, full-stack AI infrastructure platform for agentic AI applications. The partnership brings together silicon, runtime software, and enterprise cloud orchestration technologies to support deployment across data centres, hybrid, and edge environments. Both companies are developing an open approach for agentic AI platforms using high-performance infrastructure, with support from OEM partners.
As part of the agreement, AMD will invest US$150 million in Nutanix common stock at a purchase price of US$36.26 per share, and will fund up to US$100 million to support joint engineering initiatives and go-to-market collaboration related to the platform.
Asked about the strategy behind working with both Nvidia and AMD, Ramaswami said neither company sells directly to enterprises, positioning Nutanix to work with both.
“We’ve been working with Nvidia for many years on the GPU front, and you realise that they really are the de facto standard. So as we look at inferencing and agentic applications, everything we do is to take their GPUs, virtualise them, run that very efficiently with our stack, and help our customers run those workloads on top. That has been the nature of our collaboration with them,” he said.
With the agentic AI boom, Ramaswami said Nvidia sees Nutanix as a partner for reaching enterprise customers.
“They don’t have an enterprise sales force. They don’t have an enterprise platform. They are selling largely directly into the big public clouds, the native AI companies, and the neocloud companies like CoreWeave. That’s the bulk of their market today, but they see this big opportunity,” he said.
For AMD, which is the second-largest player in the GPU market, he said the partnership enables delivery of a complete agentic AI offering for enterprise use.
“When we go out there and sell our solution, and when the customers decide to use AMD GPUs, that’s how they benefit,” Ramaswami said.
Industry partnerships
Set for commercial launch by the end of the year, NetApp will combine its ONTAP platform with the hybrid multicloud operations of NCP to support storage management and containerised workloads.
Jay Tuseth, VP and General Manager, APJ at Nutanix, said the NetApp announcement reflects demand from APJ customers for this integration.
“NetApp has a large base in APJ, and there’s demand from customers for the NCP in conjunction with NetApp ONTAP. This is set to launch later this year,” he told Frontier Enterprise.
Commenting on the partnership, Helder Queiros, Senior Director, OEM & Alliances, APJ – Nutanix, said the goal is for local organisations in the region to have architectural freedom to place their data and workloads wherever they drive the most value.
“As enterprises in APJ pivot toward data-driven growth and AI readiness, the partnership between Nutanix and NetApp provides the essential foundation for that scale. We are creating an open, high-performance ecosystem that eliminates the traditional trade-offs between cloud flexibility and on-premises control,” he said.
The company also expanded its collaboration with Cisco, integrating Nutanix offerings with Cisco Unified Edge, Cisco Secure AI Factory, and Cisco AI Pod. FlexPod converged infrastructure with Cisco compute and networking, NetApp storage, and Nutanix software is planned for availability later this year.
Nutanix also announced a certified integration between the Nutanix Database Service platform and MongoDB Ops Manager, combining infrastructure automation with database management to support MongoDB operations.
Bare-metal availability
Set for general availability in the second half of 2026, Nutanix’s NKP Metal extends the Nutanix operating model and Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) to support Kubernetes deployments directly on bare-metal infrastructure.
“This is about enabling a consistent experience in how you consume storage on bare metal versus on public cloud and traditional VM-based architectures. It’s also about unified lifecycle management across these environments,” Ramaswami said in his keynote.
APAC focus
In Asia-Pacific, Nutanix continues to see customers moving away from VMware following its acquisition by Broadcom. Globally, the company added around 1,000 new customers in the last quarter. In an interview with Michael Alp, Nutanix’s Managing Director for ANZ, he said the company currently has about 20 customers in the process of migrating from VMware.
“We’re picking up a lot of customers that have used VMware for virtual machines and open source or Red Hat for containers, and are now looking to consolidate. Many applications run across both virtual machines and containers, rather than one or the other. So a lot of the customers we’re picking up are also from existing container deployments,” Alp said.
He added that the planned migration to VCF 9.0 by October 2027 is a key factor driving VMware customers to reassess their IT budgets.
“There are a lot of implications in moving to VCF 9.0. If you’ve been a traditional ESX or VVF customer, you’ve got a lot of work to do to get there. It’s not an in-place upgrade but a total redesign of your infrastructure, so that time frame is driving many customers to review their options,” he explained.
Meanwhile, Broadcom’s licensing changes have also affected service providers. Across APAC, many MSPs have been removed from the VMware program following the acquisition.
“For those organisations, and the customers they service, they’re looking for a new home, and Nutanix is one option for them. We’re seeing an increase in the number of service providers working with us. Some of that is from the changes Broadcom has made, and some from changes in our product capabilities,” Tuseth said.
Powering growth
In APJ, Tuseth said the fastest adoption of any Nutanix offering so far is NKP, which has contributed to increased AI application development.
“The largest deal that we did last quarter in Asia was for NKP, and we’re seeing it across industries with a variety of use cases. This is for actual development, which is not surprising, given the growth in developers in Asia. On the other hand, packaged applications are being replatformed or refactored for microservices. So we’re seeing growth and adoption in containers and in Kubernetes in particular, and interest in agentic AI as organisations try to move AI from pilot to production,” he said.
Five years ago, Nutanix was a hyperconverged infrastructure company. Today, it operates as a hybrid cloud provider working with AWS, Azure, and Google. The goal, Ramaswami said, is to support the majority of core storage applications.
“Now we are gradually getting into providing platform services, but we are not there yet. By no means would I say we are focusing on an app developer role, like an Atlassian or something like that. That’s not us today. We are serving the middleware, and we’re getting closer to that,” he said.
“In terms of automation, what we want to do is provide the underlying platform that can help organisations operationalise their use cases and do so in a simple way. That’s really what we do,” Ramaswami said.
