In this interview from Nutanix .NEXT 2026 in Chicago, Gregory Lehrer, vice president of business development and ecosystem at Nutanix, joins Todd Lieb, vice president of cloud partnerships at Dell Technologies, to talk with theCUBE's John Furrier and co-host Alison Kosik about how ecosystem partnerships are becoming a core competitive advantage in the enterprise AI era. Lehrer details how Nutanix's partner count has more than doubled year over year — with 5,000 attendees and over 100 sponsors on the show floor — reflecting the accelerating pull from enterprises building out AI infrastructure. Lieb frames the Dell-Nutanix relationship not as a point solution but as a layered platform play, with Nutanix sitting between Dell's AI factory hardware and the models and use cases running above it.

The conversation explores how the definition of partnership has shifted from go-to-market alignment to deep co-engineering, as customers demand fully integrated solutions spanning storage, compute, Kubernetes and agentic workloads. Lehrer underscores Nutanix's commitment to platform neutrality — working across Dell, AMD, NVIDIA and others — because enterprises no longer tolerate single-vendor lock-in. Lieb describes the overlapping partner ecosystems through a Venn diagram lens: the goal is to maximize customer choice and accelerate AI deployment regardless of where workloads land. Both guests highlight a growing ISV certification backlog as evidence of surging demand, with Lehrer noting that quality integration — not logo count — is the real measure of ecosystem health. From onboarding 1,000 new customers in a single quarter to building the containerized AI stacks that enterprises need to compete, the discussion outlines why a broad, well-integrated ecosystem has become the engine of scale.

In this interview from Nutanix .NEXT 2026 in Chicago, Tarkan Maner, president and chief commercial officer of Nutanix, joins Saud Al-Mishari, principal group product manager at Microsoft, and Scott Manchester, chief product and technology officer of Nerdio, to talk with theCUBE's John Furrier about navigating the great EUC migration era and how a three-way partnership is delivering unified hybrid experiences for modern enterprises. Maner frames the scale of the moment: with over 200 million cores changing hands as organizations exit legacy virtualization environments, end user computing has emerged as the critical modernization battleground. Al-Mishari details how Microsoft is evolving Windows365 from cloud PCs for humans to cloud PCs for AI agents — freeing workers from legacy application interfaces so agents can handle routine interactions. Manchester, who built Azure Virtual Desktop at Microsoft before joining Nerdio, explains how the two companies have maintained a partnership rooted in extending the platform's value rather than duplicating it.

The conversation also touches on the technical foundation enabling this migration surge. Al-Mishari explains how AVD Hybrid extends Microsoft's global connectivity plane — with UDP relays and ISP peering across every Azure region — directly into on-premises environments, cutting the latency that degrades user experience above 90 milliseconds. Customers migrating to the combined stack have reported reductions of more than 80% in help desk tickets, a concrete confidence signal the panel cites as evidence the experience gap has closed. Maner points to marquee deployments at State Street and Blue Cross Blue Shield — organizations navigating everything from VMware exits to HIPAA-regulated EUC workloads — as proof that outcomes at scale are achievable when ecosystem partners align on security, manageability and availability. From mapping user profiles across task workers, knowledge workers and regulated verticals to building a platform where AI agents can operate legacy applications autonomously, the panel outlines how the Microsoft-Nerdio-Nutanix ecosystem is positioned to guide enterprises through infrastructure modernization without disrupting the end user experience.

In this interview from Nutanix .NEXT 2026 in Chicago, Ketan Shah, vice president of products at Nutanix, joins Sandeep Singh, senior vice president and general manager of enterprise storage at NetApp, to talk with theCUBE's John Furrier and co-host Alison Kosik about the newly announced partnership between the two companies and how it equips enterprises to modernize infrastructure for AI and agentic workloads. Shah outlines the partnership's core premise: meeting customers where they are by combining Nutanix's cloud platform with NetApp's intelligent data foundation, while reusing existing hardware to reduce the friction of modernization. Singh underscores the elevated role of storage in the AI era, explaining how it has evolved from simply storing data to enabling real-time ransomware detection, immutable point-in-time recovery and high-performance access to KV caches that reasoning models depend on.

The conversation also explores how the partnership addresses the C-suite dimension of AI adoption, as token budgets, governance and cost per token become board-level concerns. Shah identifies three journeys Nutanix is driving — infrastructure acceleration, optimization and consumption — noting that sovereign on-premises deployments offer enterprises a path to lowering token costs while maintaining operational control. Singh reinforces that governance must be implemented across multiple layers of the stack, with time to first token and token throughput emerging as key operational metrics. Looking ahead, both leaders point to business continuity, hybrid cloud operations and agentic AI collaboration as the next frontiers for the partnership, with a general availability release planned for later this year. From IT administrators evolving into platform engineers to the convergence of AI-native and cloud-native architectures, the discussion illustrates how Nutanix and NetApp are positioning enterprises to turn AI ambition into measurable operational results.

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, Dan Regalado, chief information officer of Wynn Resorts, joins theCUBE's John Furrier and co-host Alison Kosik to discuss how a luxury resort operator is modernizing its hybrid infrastructure and applying AI to deliver seamless, personalized guest experiences at scale. Regalado explains Wynn's infrastructure philosophy — running cloud workloads where velocity and scalability matter and on-premise systems where security and stability are paramount. He details the company's migration from VMware to Nutanix at its Boston property, a carefully phased transition that now supports nearly 500 virtual machines powering casino gaming platforms, smart room automation and on-property sports betting. Regalado also notes Wynn is actively exploring Nutanix's on-premise and hybrid AI capabilities as it weighs data sovereignty and cost efficiency against its current cloud-first approach.

The conversation also explores how Wynn is approaching AI through three distinct lenses: operational efficiency, automation and personalization. Regalado describes a model where AI workers function as teammates alongside human staff — handling repetitive tasks through robotic process automation and accelerating software development through vibe coding — while freeing frontline employees to focus on the hospitality that defines the Wynn experience. He underscores a core company principle: technology will not replace the human warmth that drives guest satisfaction, but will empower teams to deliver it more consistently and at greater scale. Regalado also touches on how AI is reshaping C-suite dynamics, with leadership now meeting weekly to track adoption progress and actively prioritizing AI fluency in new hires. From using AI to surface real-time customer sentiment insights to personalizing how individual guests are recognized and rewarded, Regalado outlines how Wynn is building a future where human creativity and AI capability reinforce each other.