Nutanix .NEXT 2026 | Sachin Chheda, Nutanix & Bryan Smith, Expedient

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Sachin Chheda

Vice President, Business Development and Strategic Partnership

Nutanix

Bryan Smith

CEO

Expedient

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Sachin Chheda, Nutanix & Bryan Smith, Expedient

Sachin Chheda

Vice President, Business Development and Strategic Partnership Nutanix

Bryan Smith

CEO Expedient

In this interview from Nutanix .NEXT 2026, Sachin Chheda, general manager of Nutanix Elevate Service Provider at Nutanix, joins Bryan Smith, chief executive officer of Expedient, to talk with theCUBE's John Furrier and co-host Alison Kosik about how enterprises are turning AI ambition into measurable business outcomes through modern hybrid cloud infrastructure. Chheda details two major conference announcements: SP Central, a multi-tenancy platform enabling service providers to build scalable, secure AI-native services on Nutanix, and the broader "Powered by N... Read more

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What is the impact of this year's keynotes, and what announcements were made for service providers—specifically SP Central and "Powered by Nutanix"—regarding AI-native workloads, multi-tenant services, and cloud/AI offerings? add

How have client conversations shifted between infrastructure, cloud, and AI, and what outcomes or ROI are they now seeking? add

What are the main considerations for companies rethinking their infrastructure and vendors, and how do they decide whether to build solutions in-house or buy services from providers? add

Why do organizations often begin their cloud journey with disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) instead of adopting just a single component? add

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Sachin Chheda, Nutanix & Bryan Smith, Expedient

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Alison Kosik

>> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are in Chicago and we are streaming live at Nutanix.NEXT. I'm Alison Kosik. I am the host for today and I got a great copilot here with John Furrier. He's the co-founder and co-CEO of SiliconANGLE theCUBE. And I am so excited to be sitting here at this desk with you at a time where we're seeing so much change. VMware, Broadcom, we're seeing a shift.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. Their customer base is shifting to kind of virtualization becoming isolated for certain use cases, but the AI stack's emerging. The AI infrastructure is merging and Nutanix's platform is hitting this AI stack. And for the first time, we're seeing visibility into how that infrastructure layer is actually piggybacking on top of NVIDIA and all the semiconductors that are building these large AI factories and enabling a lot of value. And I think this next session is a highlight of where that value is being created and then gives us a tell sign where it will be extracted. So this should be a great segment.

Alison Kosik

>> Yeah. Let's broaden the conversation a bit and bring in our guests. We've got Sachin Chheda, he's the GM with Nutanix Elevate Service Provider. And we've got Bryan Smith, the chief executive officer of Expedient. Welcome to theCUBE. I want to start out with you, Sachin, because some of our viewers are not too technical and just kind of want to get an idea of what a service provider is in today's cloud economy and why it's becoming more and more important.

Sachin Chheda

>> Oh, thank you for having me. A service provider, as we define it, is somebody who's delivering a service to their end customer. An end customer could be an organization like a financial services institution or a school, et cetera. And they're consuming IT as a service. And this could be infrastructure to run their virtual machines, to run their applications. It could be desktops, or it could be something a higher order as software as a service on that front.

John Furrier

>> As you guys have this opportunity, share the keynote impact.

Sachin Chheda

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> Because we've heard Kubernetes, containers, roles of virtual machines, but now you have an entirely new shift. We've crossed the threshold of AI native.

Sachin Chheda

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> We're seeing all the active open source.

Sachin Chheda

>> Sure.

John Furrier

>> You're seeing the rise of the Neocloud, which is more Hyperscalers, basically. GPU as a service. The enterprises are kind of licking their chops, waiting to get into the game. I know, Bryan, you're in that game, but talk about what's the impact of this year's keynotes. We heard new things.

Sachin Chheda

>> Yes. So we had a couple of announcements related to the service providers this conference. And let me quickly recap that. So the first one was the announcement of the SP Central offering. This is our offering tied to the service provider space, allowing a partner to build a multi-tenanted service on Nutanix and do so in a way that is scalable and secure. And they do this by basically having each individual tenant manage their own environment or co-manage their own environment. So that's the first part of the equation. And that, by the way, can be used for multiple different services. You mentioned AI native workloads. That's part of the equation, that's part of the announcement stack as well. So a service provider like Expedient, who I have Bryan here, can basically build an AI native service for their customers tied to that on that front. The second part of the announcement is the powered by Nutanix story. So we're excited to be working with our partners to basically build out these services, including the IS services, the PASs services, services for cloud native workloads, and AI, and essentially deliver it to our customers. And do so in a way that is aligned with our architectural designs.

John Furrier

>> Bryan, as the CEO, you have visibility into your customer base. We're seeing massive demand for AI infrastructure.

>> Right.

John Furrier

>> We're seeing enterprises trying to get the scale and in production scale, new capabilities with AI. So the strategy's not really risky. Infuse AI in everything, check. Execution is a whole nother ballgame.

>> Right.

John Furrier

>> So talk about what you guys got going on, some of the momentum, and what's changed with this new era.

Sachin Chheda

>> Absolutely. It's a great question that we find that the conversation has shifted from infrastructure or AI, and it's really the blend. So we talked about intelligent infrastructure is the combination of cloud, data, and AI, and data's the glue between both of them. And so it's really how you can quickly get to the outcome. So we find that there's two main conversations that clients are having. One is around cloud rebalancing and right workload, right place. But the other one is outcomes from AI. Because last year was dabbling, trying different things, but now they actually want to say, "What's the ROI? What's the actual impact? And when do I get it?"

John Furrier

>> Talk about the outcome, because I'm not going to say it's a cliche, but we've heard this movie. We've seen this movie before.

>> Sure.

John Furrier

>> We're outcome oriented. Actually, you can do that now. You can actually achieve outcomes when you just decide we want more revenue or we want accelerated delivery of a product. Outcomes are gettable now.

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> Talk about that dynamic because that's now working back, people working backwards from outcomes. Versus deploying technology and saying, "Okay, is there a pony in there somewhere?" I mean, this is a new philosophy.

Sachin Chheda

>> Yeah. And Expedient does this and there's other providers in this space as well that really help get the client all the way to that outcome by helping map out their business process, implement and integrate with their data, but actually put the pieces together and actually have the major ability. So like in our AI offering, there's a dashboard that they can actually see exactly what is the benefit from each of the different programs, workflows, agents that are in use. And it could be from a dollar perspective, it could be an hour perspective. And you can generally pay for the entire platform and implementation from a single agent implementation.

John Furrier

>> Talk about your business model with Nutanix as a partner. How has that changed staffing, momentum? Talk about the demand and how you're executing.

Sachin Chheda

>> Yeah. Well, just in the last year, we doubled the number of new logos that we average as a company. And those were just from AI as a service first, and now we're seeing them bleed over into the infrastructure. So having a unified platform that can do all the different components really helps accelerate from our side because we're not developing technology, we're curators of technology. So the less different technology stacks that we need to interact with, the faster we can move and the more complete the solution is for the client.

Alison Kosik

>> Sachin, with the service providers that you're working with now, what about the business model is becoming different? Is it about growth, profitability? Is it about survival? What is it about?

Sachin Chheda

>> So there are actually a couple factors that I wanted to talk about. First is that Broadcom has disenfranchised quite a few of these service providers out there. They have essentially consolidated their base to a very small subset of partners, and a lot of the partners that were disenfranchised have no other option, right? So they have to go figure out what should they do to continue running their businesses. So for them, it's almost an existential challenge that they have to look back, right? Some of these folks are coming in and saying, "Hey, listen, we're going to go up the stack and work with other partners like Expedient that's offering a white label service based on Nutanix and essentially build the service on that." Or they become partners of Nutanix on that front. So there, the profitability then comes into play. How do they do so? How do they make sure that they have that transition with minimal risk in a profitable manner? And that's where we have actually worked very closely with them to build our program. And that program includes constructs like SP consumption, involves constructs like selling out together from that standpoint. And that helps them basically get on their feet with Nutanix a lot quicker.

John Furrier

>> How has that migration been? Migration's always kind of like, "Whoa, a migration."

Sachin Chheda

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> Has AI changed that game? And speak to that because we're hearing stories of accelerated migrations, clones, tested out, new kinds of ways to move faster.

Sachin Chheda

>> Right. I'm going to bring up an example from another partner here at the conference, it's one of our platinum sponsors. That basically they built an agentic system that encapsulates our move tool and essentially accelerates the migration. So what it's doing is essentially doing a lot of the research, a lot of the data collection, a lot of the planning ahead of time, even before they start the actual move. And by doing so, they are accelerating their plans and helping kind of build that. And then once that's done, the actual migration happens in an automated fashion.

John Furrier

>> I mean, if AI can write code, they can write migration scripts.

Sachin Chheda

>> Very much so.

John Furrier

>> Scripts, I'm over simplifying it.

>> Give you a hard data fact with that, that we've done over 400 migrations in the last year, and we've only had to roll back one from the first attempt.

John Furrier

>> So you're hitting it straight out of the park right away.

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> All right. What's the impact on that business? What happens next? They migrate, then what?

>> They grow.

John Furrier

>> How do they do it? What's the playbook?

>> Yeah. A lot of it is that story of having that entire platform in stack. So data is the central key to everything. So once we have the security foundation set, there's a comfort level to give their employees and their teams access to AI and additional capabilities. And then once you have the security piece, then you're integrating the data, making it usable so the value keeps increasing. And then you're getting them comfortable with the different tooling and showing them what's possible. So you get this exponential acceleration inside the business.

Alison Kosik

>> And this question I could ask to both of you, when companies rethink their infrastructure systems, their infrastructure vendors at this point, I mean, it's a huge decision, obviously. What are customers looking for? They're looking for lower costs, more control, less risk.

Sachin Chheda

>> So it comes to a build versus buy scenario, right? And there are different factors that they would consider. They'd consider risk, cost, CapEx, OpEx, they'd consider staffing. I think staffing has become a big issue for a lot of folks here, especially if they've got legacy workloads that they have to maintain. And they'd rather look at basically buying services that they can consume instead of building them or maintaining them. And that's been a big part of the equation. And that's where honestly a service provider is probably in the best position. That's one of the reasons why I'm so excited about this time is because a service provider can come in and look at it from a business standpoint. You talked about business factors earlier. That is definitely a starting point for a lot of our partners as they go into that infrastructure decision making process.

Alison Kosik

>> Do you have anything to add?

Sachin Chheda

>> Yeah. There's another big factor that's very timely now, which is the supply chain availability has factored into the build versus buy. Because there's effectively a wait tax that's been applied that if you wait a quarter, you should expect to spend 20 to 30% more on hardware than you did previously. So they have to factor that in and the speed of decision making changes a lot. And service providers generally can see around the corner more than a single enterprise. So that we're buying hardware nine months, 12 months in advance and placing those orders so we can in-run and have a buffer that helps clients get what they need in a very timely manner.

John Furrier

>> And you have to figure out the supply chain impact on demand. You don't want to over-provision too much. At the same time, you want to have enough capacity to satisfy the demand. Is that a concern? Or?

Sachin Chheda

>> Well, Nutanix has helped a lot actually by expanding the hardware compatibility. And it opens up and gives you some additional options inside the hardware space so that you can combination of use, reuse something that you may have already had for a different purpose, or widen who your different supply chain is.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. Bryan, talk about your business. I want to get this out there because I think it's important to illustrate. Talk about your main value proposition and where are you winning? And take us through the life of a customer. What goes on?

>> Yep.

John Furrier

>> What are you leaning in on? What are you doubling down on?

Sachin Chheda

>> Yeah. So our conversation really starts with meeting the client where they are. So it's not a change everything. It's like change the least amount of things that deliver the biggest impact. So our core business is really infrastructure as a service and then also on the managed AI services. So we're looking at an entire client environment and saying, "What can they do?" And use components that they have in place, marry those into the environment and then make incremental changes. So through their normal refresh cycle, they can get it to a cloud operating model where they've minimized their licensing expense, they're maximizing the utilization of the overall hardware. And they're limiting the amount of time that their team is spending managing the day to day. So they very much are shifting to the higher level things that people talked for years like, "Focus on your business." But that's true now more than ever because that focus on the business using AI can deliver a return that wasn't possible a few years ago.

John Furrier

>> You mentioned earlier, I got triggered, trigger word, cloud repatriation. Is that a thing? And you mentioned right sizing, I forget the word you used, balancing.

>> Yeah, balancing.

John Furrier

>> Right sizing, balancing, that's cloud spend, that's cloud optimization, that's cloud resource essentially. And you've got the on premises where it's like, that's where the data is. The models aren't crawling inside the enterprise. So there's an unlock on the data piece, a little bit of data gravity. So talk about repatriation and resizing because I got to deploy something to maximize that asset.

>> Right. And that's why we use the term cloud rebalancing because it encompasses all of that of which hypervisor should I use? What should I do at the edge versus at the central headquarters? When should I use Hyperscale? Because we don't view that we're a competitor more of a compliment to Hyperscale because there's a perfect time you should use Hyperscale. There's a perfect time you should use a provider like Expedient. Because people view Hyperscale often to be they're buying optionality, they're buying flexibility, but most companies' workloads are fairly consistent. And on those consistent workloads, a private cloud environment is going to be 30% less expensive generally, but also much faster to overall deploy.

Sachin Chheda

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> What are the key things you're winning with Nutanix? Could you just quickly share a plug? Because a lot of people are trying to figure this out, that whole on prem relationship with the cloud. Talk about where you're winning and where Nutanix fits.

>> Yeah. Some of the big wins often start with disaster recovery as a service. So Nutanix clients that already love their technology that wanted to have a more resilient environment is one of the most common. The private cloud deployments, it would be number two. We're very excited about the multi-tenancy because that's a complete unlock for the service provider space for both the mid-market. Because most of what we've done with Nutanix has been on the larger side of mid-market to enterprise. And now it actually pulls in a whole new space when you have the multi-tenancy component as well. And then when you fold in the AI platform, you really round out that offering overall. So we leverage that entire platform. And that's what I think one of the differentiators of a service provider is actually getting the maximum value out of the entire technology stack versus picking and choosing just one component to use.

Sachin Chheda

>> Yeah. And if I can add, we have customers like Brinks Home Security that they start their journey with DR as a service with Expedient, right? And that's happening globally. So we have partners out there that are basically driving this DR data resiliency issue. There's also a lot of push around sovereignty and EMEA, et cetera, that you're seeing that. Where the data has to be localized, the operations have to be localized. And that's playing a pretty big role for a lot of the adoption.

>> And the data gravity tied to the data sovereignty with AI is also driving a lot of the adoption and utilization in the private cloud space.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. And the market just opens up. You get the mid-market underserved, enterprises need tailored solutions. Win-win.

>> Yeah. And the skillsets that they need because skillsets and infrastructure you mentioned are hard to come by already. And when you add in the AI skillset that's just new for everybody, then mid-market really gets squeezed a lot.

John Furrier

>> Yeah.

Sachin Chheda

>> Yeah.

Alison Kosik

>> All right. Thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE, Sachin, Bryan. Great conversation, some great insights. Thank you.

Sachin Chheda

>> Thank you.

Sachin Chheda

>> Thank you for having us.

Alison Kosik

>> All right. We're going to take a quick break. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live technology coverage. We'll be back right after this break.