This discussion explores ecosystem-driven artificial intelligence, abbreviated AI, infrastructure and partnerships at Nutanix .NEXT 2026. Hosts Alison Kosik and John Furrier conduct a live interview with Todd Lieb of Dell and Gregory Lehrer of Nutanix. The guests bring deep expertise in AI infrastructure, partnerships and platform engineering and discuss ecosystem strategy, co-engineering, AI factories, Kubernetes, observability and hybrid cloud trends shaping enterprise deployments. Topics covered include strategies for partner integration and independent software vendor, abbreviated ISV, certifications, control plane architectures, storage and data management, and collaboration with accelerator vendors such as NVIDIA. The conversation highlights practical approaches to scaling enterprise AI deployments and the role of interoperability in delivering customer value. Key takeaways include the centrality of ecosystem diversity and interoperability as a competitive advantage. Lehrer emphasizes accelerating ISV certifications and partner integration to meet customer demand, and they call for tighter alignment between platform providers and software partners. Lieb positions Dell's AI factory as a platform layer with Nutanix providing the control plane, and they note storage, data management and co-engineering with NVIDIA as strategic priorities for scaling enterprise AI deployments.

This discussion explores ecosystem-driven artificial intelligence, abbreviated AI, infrastructure and partnerships at Nutanix .NEXT 2026. Hosts Alison Kosik and John Furrier conduct a live interview with Todd Lieb of Dell and Gregory Lehrer of Nutanix. The guests bring deep expertise in AI infrastructure, partnerships and platform engineering and discuss ecosystem strategy, co-engineering, AI factories, Kubernetes, observability and hybrid cloud trends shaping enterprise deployments. Topics covered include strategies for partner integration and independent software vendor, abbreviated ISV, certifications, control plane architectures, storage and data management, and collaboration with accelerator vendors such as NVIDIA. The conversation highlights practical approaches to scaling enterprise AI deployments and the role of interoperability in delivering customer value. Key takeaways include the centrality of ecosystem diversity and interoperability as a competitive advantage. Lehrer emphasizes accelerating ISV certifications and partner integration to meet customer demand, and they call for tighter alignment between platform providers and software partners. Lieb positions Dell's AI factory as a platform layer with Nutanix providing the control plane, and they note storage, data management and co-engineering with NVIDIA as strategic priorities for scaling enterprise AI deployments.

In this interview from Nutanix .NEXT 2026, Thomas Cornely, executive vice president of product management at Nutanix, joins Ketan Shah, vice president of products at Nutanix, to talk with theCUBE's John Furrier about how enterprises are modernizing infrastructure to run agentic AI workloads at scale. Cornely and Shah describe what they call one of Nutanix's biggest releases in company history — spanning agentic AI readiness, a unified VM and container experience, expanded hardware ecosystem support and simplified management for distributed and sovereign environments. Shah explains how the "leverage what you have" philosophy underpins the release, enabling customers to run Nutanix on a wider range of servers and integrate with existing storage from Dell, NetApp and Lenovo — lowering the hardware barrier to entry in a supply-constrained market.

The conversation also explores how enterprises are navigating rapid AI sprawl and the governance challenges it creates. Shah unpacks the company's AI Gateway, a new capability that gives organizations visibility into agent activity, enforces rate limits and redirects token consumption across model endpoints — addressing cost and security governance as agentic workloads proliferate. Cornely frames sovereignty not merely as a data protection concern but as a financial and competitive strategy, highlighting the new Service Provider Central offering that enables MSPs and neo-clouds to deliver a full managed services stack — from VMs to AI as a service — on Nutanix infrastructure. From co-engineering validated solutions with Cisco, Dell and Lenovo to delivering an AI catalog inside NKP for developer self-service, both executives outline why Nutanix sees the agentic AI era as its broadest platform opportunity yet.

In this interview from Nutanix .NEXT 2026, Rajiv Ramaswami, chief executive officer of Nutanix, joins theCUBE's John Furrier and co-host Alison Kosik to discuss the company's evolution from a hyperconverged infrastructure leader into a full agentic AI platform. Ramaswami charts Nutanix's deliberate shift — from HCI and end-user computing to a platform capable of orchestrating containers, virtual machines and AI pipelines across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. He argues that AI has moved from experimentation into operations: enterprises must now manage not just applications and infrastructure but data pipelines, model governance and autonomous agents. A core technical focus is GPU optimization — Nutanix has extended its hypervisor to handle topology-aware workload placement and key-value cache offloading, keeping GPUs fully utilized and driving down cost per token, the unit of economics enterprises are now watching most closely. The conversation also explores how Nutanix's expanding ecosystem — more than 100 partners at the event, spanning cloud, server, storage and chip providers — validates its platform ambitions. Ramaswami details new AI PaaS services set to launch this summer, offering developers curated open-source components alongside cost, access and governance controls for model deployment. The discussion shifts to sovereign clouds, where governments worldwide are funding infrastructure build-outs not just to protect data but to stimulate local economies and help domestic industries adopt AI at scale — an opportunity Ramaswami sees as particularly significant for Nutanix. He identifies simplicity and governance as the company's core long-term bets: the more accessible and cost-effective AI becomes to consume, the faster enterprise adoption grows, and sound governance ensures security, data privacy and access controls keep pace. From defining hyperconverged infrastructure to becoming the platform of choice for every application in an AI-driven world, Ramaswami outlines why Nutanix is positioning itself as the enabling layer for intelligence everywhere.