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Nutanix held its user conference - .NEXT – last week in Washington D.C. If it felt a bit cult-like that was only in the good sense, as befits an organization with NPS scores over 90% for three years running (that is ethereal territory).

As many other vendors are running hard, hoping to catch Nutanix and steal/borrow its “HCI cloak,” so it is running just as fast to try to ensure that spot is vacant by the time any others get there. It spent the conference explaining and promoting the malleability and expansion of its “Enterprise Cloud” approach.

Some key takeaways from, and comments about, the event can be found in the ESG On Location video that my colleagues Terri McClure, Brian Garrett, and I shot while there.

This week Nutanix kicks off .NEXT, its annual user conference. I'm looking forward to it because it provides such a great opportunity to catch up with many Nutanix customers, partners, and executives in a very short time. I have to be careful not to get lost in the echo chamber though—when I attended my first .NEXT last year, it was a bit surreal. It was like being at a cult meeting—Nutanix users I spoke with were seriously enthusiastic about the Nutanix experience!

That was fast! HPE only announced it planned to acquire hyperconverged software vendor SimpliVity on January 17, and it closed exactly one month later, on February 17. Why the hurry? Because they need to!

You can't let a market get away from you, and hyperconverged is a fast growing market. When ESG surveyed IT managers responsible for cloud infrastructure decisions, we learned that hyperconverged systems are playing a huge role in IT's plans. When ESG surveyed IT managers responsible for cloud infrastructure, we found that 85% of them are using or plan to adopt hyperconverged solutions. 

Today Nutanix announced it is acquiring Pernix Data and Calm.IO. Not a lot of details were announced, but these acquisitions provide a clear view into Nutanix’s broader strategy and future aspirations. Why? Because, as my colleague Mark Peters likes to say, over recent decades we have slowly moved from IT standing (as it was intended to) for “information technology” to it really being all about “infrastructure technology”.

2016 could be a boon year for hyperconverged vendors. As I covered in a recent blog/video, nearly 70% of IT respondents to ESG’s survey on hybrid cloud trends indicated they plan to adopt hyperconverged solutions. While this is clearly a bullish signal, one area that gives IT planners cause for concern is vendor lock-in. In fact, these same IT respondents cited “giving too much control to one vendor” and “vendor lock-in” as two reasons that might dissuade them from using hyperconverged technology. But what if a hyperconverged solution could allay these concerns by helping businesses eliminate hypervisor software lock-in? 

I attended Nutanix’s first end-user conference and it was good to hear directly from its spokespeople as opposed to the market hype we all get exposed to. Nutanix’s goal is to take complex infrastructure and make it simple. In fact, they went as far as to say they want to make infrastructure invisible.

I recently had the opportunity to attend DellWorld 2014 in my hometown of Austin, Texas. One year after going private, Dell seems, at least to this outside observer, to be filled with excitement and optimism for the future. The positive atmosphere comes as a welcome change from what seems to be a sea of turmoil encompassing the remaining server-storage players in the IT market these days. HP recently announced plans to split the company into two, separating the consumer and enterprise pieces. This news comes in the wake of IBM selling its X-series server business to Lenovo. The list of end-to-end IT providers is rapidly shrinking.

Before I jump into the wild world of IT hypervconverged infrastructure, let’s quickly remind ourselves of the benefits ESG has seen from these types of deployments:

Earlier this year, Dell introduced its PowerEdge VRTX into the market with a goal of simplifying IT infrastructure for midmarket customers and ROBOs (remote office branch office). Further details and insights are located in this blog and ESG brief: