President & Chief Executive Officer (Board Member), Nutanix, Inc.
Opening Keynote with Rajiv Ramaswami
Join us for a high-impact opening keynote featuring Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami as he reveals our 2026 platform roadmap ...
About Rajiv Ramaswami
Rajiv Ramaswami, CEO of Nutanix, delivered the opening keynote at a company event in Chicago on July 7, 2026, where he discussed the company's platform roadmap and the impact of agentic AI. During the keynote, he described hypothetical AI agents for personal tasks such as regulating metabolism, expediting airport security, and managing email. In a conversation with a customer from the casino industry, Ramaswami noted that the customer planned to open a new resort using Nutanix's hypervisor and management tools, and that the customer's CEO was driving AI adoption across guest-facing experiences, personalization, and operational efficiency. Ramaswami also criticized VMware and Broadcom, stating that Broadcom is "forcing you to buy the full stack" and "capturing the maximum amount of profits," and urged customers to consider whether that is where they want to invest. He added that Nutanix aims to help customers "reduce your dependence" on such vendors and "meet your current and future needs with a modern platform." On the company's Q3 2026 earnings call on May 26, 2026, Ramaswami said Nutanix sees demand driven by businesses modernizing IT, adopting hybrid cloud models, and deploying cloud-native applications including AI. He noted that AMD recently invested up to $250 million in Nutanix and that the companies are working on joint solutions with AMD GPUs. Regarding hardware supply, Ramaswami stated that lead times for appliance vendors range from a few weeks to six months depending on configuration and vendor, and that Nutanix expects hardware prices to remain elevated into fiscal year 2027. He also attributed a higher average contract duration in Q3 to a mix of larger, longer-duration transactions across land, expand, and renewals.
Transcript (63 segments)
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Host1:06
Please welcome Nutanix Chief Executive Officer, Rajiv Ramaswami.
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Rajiv Ramaswami1:20
Good afternoon, everybody. It's my favorite time of the year to spend with you – our customers and partners – discussing our innovation roadmap and ecosystem. Agentic AI is transforming everything, and I've been thinking about agents for metabolism, travel, and email. But seriously, every CIO wants to adopt AI while grappling with integration, returns, digital sovereignty, and supply chain challenges. We're committed to delivering simplicity, TCO reduction, flexibility, and world-class support with an industry-leading NPS of 90+. Over the next hour, we'll cover three things: agentic AI, modernizing applications with containers, and our core innovations. Starting with agentic AI – we're moving from prompting to delegating autonomy with agents. The key building block is the AI factory. Nutanix's agentic stack, announced at GTC, includes: (1) AI services on Kubernetes, (2) optimized infrastructure (AHV, Flow), (3) data operations (KV cache offload, low-latency streaming), and (4) multi-tenant management. We've partnered with AMD (up to $250M investment) and NVIDIA (certified storage partner). Today we announced Service Provider Central for resource sharing and multi-tenancy, enabling GPUs, models, and Kubernetes as a service. This complete stack delivers a cloud operating model for AI factories with security, governance, and cost-per-token optimization. Power International in the Middle East uses our stack for centralized governance across 400+ entities. Now, switching to cloud native – we unify containers and VMs on one platform with NKP Metal (now in early access) for bare-metal performance. We offer consistent storage, networking, security, and database services across environments. For your immediate needs, we continue to grow our ecosystem: Cisco Unified Communications is now certified on AHV, and Microsoft AVD is hybrid on Nutanix. Now let's hear from customers. I'm excited to introduce Josh Hostetler, Lead Platform Engineer at Tire Rack.
Great to have you, Josh. Thank you. Welcome. Welcome. You know, so tell us a bit about Tire Rack and your role there.
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Josh Hostetler23:09
Sure. Tire Rack started as a mail order business. Now we're an e-commerce platform serving over a million drivers every year. We have forty-seven years of tire experience, delivering over two million tires often by the next day. I started twelve years ago as Lead Platform Engineer on a small team of three people. We cover the website, Nutanix platform, content delivery network, databases – all to ensure the best customer experience.
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Rajiv Ramaswami23:45
You know, I've got to say, I've been a Tire Rack customer for twenty-plus years. I remember buying tires off your catalog.
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Josh Hostetler23:50
Yes.
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Rajiv Ramaswami23:52
And then I think you moved from catalog sales to your modern e-commerce platform. And tell us a bit about that and how Nutanix has helped you on that journey.
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Josh Hostetler24:02
Sure. As I mentioned, we're a small team. We needed to move off an aging Solaris SPARC infrastructure. Our primary goal was to reduce administrative burden. We found that with Nutanix's one-click lifecycle management and single phone call for both hardware and software support. That was all for your traditional application.
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Rajiv Ramaswami24:21
Your e-commerce application was initially just a monolithic application, right?
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Josh Hostetler24:25
That's correct.
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Rajiv Ramaswami24:28
And now one interesting thing I saw about Tire Rack was your environment. You're running those, your main e-commerce application on-prem?
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Josh Hostetler24:34
Yes.
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Rajiv Ramaswami24:40
So what's driving that?
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Josh Hostetler24:41
There's a couple reasons. The primary reason's data gravity – we have a lot of data on a mainframe system on-prem, so our workloads do best near that data. Secondly, complexity – if we moved off-prem, we might need to hire more engineers and learn another tech stack.
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Rajiv Ramaswami25:00
Yeah. And now you're also modernizing your application – it's many years old and monolithic. So what are you doing with that e-commerce application today?
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Josh Hostetler25:14
Yeah. So today we're leaning into that platform. We started simple with web servers on AHV. As the website grew, we moved into unified storage for media. When we wanted to run an open-source database like Postgres, we looked at NDB. The developers wanted to break down the monolith, so Kubernetes was the natural choice. We found NKP to be that solution.
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Rajiv Ramaswami25:40
And so you're breaking down this monolith, refactoring it into microservices, right?
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Josh Hostetler25:45
Yeah.
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Rajiv Ramaswami25:50
And what are the benefits from your perspective?
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Josh Hostetler25:55
As our site grows, we run into operational issues affecting user experience. For example, traffic is seasonal – when that first winter storm hits, we want to keep our cart stable but scale our search service. Kubernetes helps with auto-scaling and auto-healing.
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Rajiv Ramaswami26:17
Indeed. You have a small team, and you've transformed from managing traditional infrastructure to being a platform engineer. What advice do you have for others?
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Josh Hostetler27:03
From a platform engineering perspective, start with your fundamentals early – automation, security, monitoring – they'll become crucial as your systems grow. Lastly, success isn't all about technology; it's also about the strength of the partnership. It's been a big success for us with Nutanix.
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Rajiv Ramaswami27:25
Tell us more about how you personally navigated this journey, learning new technologies with a small team.
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Josh Hostetler27:36
I'm a tinkerer. I love to learn. When new solutions come available, I step into them and spend time breaking them down and understanding them.
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Rajiv Ramaswami27:48
You've done that very successfully, managing this critical e-commerce application. It's the lifeblood of your company. Fantastic. We appreciate the partnership. Thank you for being here.
Thank you, Josh. Take care. Thanks. Give it up for Josh, please.
So we've spoken about AI and cloud native. Now let's talk about here and now – your immediate needs. Having flexibility to run anything anywhere – on-prem, public cloud, choice of hardware, sweating assets – is critical. Our ecosystem continues to grow. Cisco Unified Communications is now fully certified on AHV. We're working with Microsoft on AVD – now hybrid on Nutanix, enabling lower latency for virtual desktops. I'd love to invite Dan Regalado, CIO at Wynn North America.
Dan, great to see you. Thank you for being here.
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Dan Regalado32:51
Thank you for having me, Rajiv.
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Rajiv Ramaswami32:53
We love the Wynn brand. Tell us about Wynn and your role.
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Dan Regalado32:59
Wynn is the best integrated resort in the world. We're in Las Vegas, Boston, Macau, just acquired a company in London, and are opening the first integrated resort in UAE. I'm the CIO. My predecessor Jason picked Nutanix for Boston. We migrated from VMware, and as of this month, we are 100% on Nutanix in Boston.
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Rajiv Ramaswami34:27
Not a small feat – every minute of downtime can cost millions. How are you thinking about AI for Wynn?
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Dan Regalado36:02
Our CEO is driving AI across the organization – guest-facing experiences, personalization, and operational efficiency. We've done AI in the cloud, but we're researching on-prem or hybrid for data security, grounding with our own data, and cost efficiency. Sovereignty is also key – gaming data can't leave the state.
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Rajiv Ramaswami37:40
We're thrilled with our partnership. It's not about technology, it's about people. Dan, thank you.
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Dan Regalado37:54
Absolutely. I'm happy I can pick up the phone and call you. That's the power of the relationship.
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Rajiv Ramaswami38:09
No, absolutely. I look forward to being your trusted partner for many years. Thank you, everyone.
This is how we work with every customer – as a trusted partner. Wynn is a great example. Now, we've made it easier to adopt Nutanix by supporting external storage. Last year we announced Dell PowerFlex and Everpure Flash Array. The traction has been amazing. Let's hear from Stephen Hall, VP of Infrastructure and Operations at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee.
Good to have you on, Stephen.
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Stephen Hall40:10
Great to be here.
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Rajiv Ramaswami40:11
Tell us about BlueCross BlueShield and your role.
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Stephen Hall40:13
Sure. Good afternoon. I'm the Vice President of Infrastructure and Operations at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee. We're a mission-driven company serving over 3 million members. My job is to ensure our IT infrastructure never stands in the way of members accessing quality, affordable healthcare.
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Rajiv Ramaswami40:40
You've been a Nutanix customer for years. How did the journey start?
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Stephen Hall40:47
It started in VDI. About six or seven years ago, we ran into limitations with our platform. Nutanix HCI rose to the top. We implemented it and started looking for other opportunities. The support has been great – when we had issues, Nutanix was right there. We stopped asking 'Why Nutanix?' and started asking 'Why not?' We brought our own hardware, ran natively on AHV, and recently stood up a 500-person call center in record time. We're now 75% migrated to AHV, hoping to be 100% by year end.
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Rajiv Ramaswami42:57
You were an early adopter of the Everpure solution. What drove that?
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Stephen Hall43:04
Everpure was another option Nutanix brought to the table, allowing us to migrate even more workloads. The three-way partnership with Everpure has been successful. We migrated all non-production in days, and our first production workload over a weekend.
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Rajiv Ramaswami43:45
That's great. It's the simplicity of experience – same simple experience as HCI with external storage. Looking ahead, what are you focused on?
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Stephen Hall44:02
We're working on NC2 (Nutanix Cloud Clusters) with small production workloads, aiming to add more by summer. Also leveraging NC2 for replication with a pilot light concept. We're looking at NKP and NUS, and I need to hear more about Nutanix AI.
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Rajiv Ramaswami44:55
Absolutely. Any advice for practitioners here?
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Stephen Hall45:04
Look for a partner with good support – you can't do anything without it. Options are key as the industry changes. Finally, innovation – having a partner that thinks ahead allows you to focus on delivering results.
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Rajiv Ramaswami46:01
Wonderful. Thank you, Stephen.
Again, it's great to hear how BlueCross BlueShield started with one use case and expanded. We're not stopping there. Dell PowerStore is now in early access, available this summer. I also announced a partnership with NetApp, with a validated solution coming later this year. And we're expanding with Lenovo ThinkSystem. Now, choice also includes public cloud. For years, Nutanix Cloud Clusters have enabled solutions on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. I'm thrilled to introduce Akshay Sharma from State Street.
Thank you for being here, Akshay.
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Akshay Sharma52:21
Thank you, Rajiv.
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Rajiv Ramaswami52:23
Tell us about State Street and your role.
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Akshay Sharma52:39
We are a globally systemically important bank (GSIB) with a 232-year heritage. With about $52 trillion in assets under custody and $5 trillion under management, we are the global leader in investment services. 11.5% of the world's financial assets run through our systems daily. I serve as head of cloud platforms, democratizing technology to improve developer velocity while maintaining regulatory rigor.
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Rajiv Ramaswami53:51
State Street was one of the first banks to adopt a cloud-first strategy. What drove that?
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Akshay Sharma54:02
It was about enabling speed, security, resiliency, and reducing risk at scale. We pursued a hybrid multicloud strategy with hyperscalers and colocation. We even sold our data centers to AWS and are leasing them back. That created urgency to move to the 'new house'.
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Rajiv Ramaswami55:37
Tell us about your application estate and how Nutanix helps.
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Akshay Sharma55:46
We have about 2,000 applications – a complex mix of mainframe, mid-range, Exadata, Sybase, vended software, and homegrown apps. For our cloud journey, we defined multiple pathways from lift-and-shift to full re-architecture. Nutanix helped with VDI across colo and cloud – we successfully rolled out a platform for 51,000 users across three continents, with user experience jumping from 60% to 90% positive. We've expanded to NC2 on AWS for general compute workloads. The platform has simplified operations, standardized environments, and provided reliability at scale.
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Rajiv Ramaswami59:46
That's amazing. What advice do you have for others?
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Akshay Sharma1:00:36
Treat cloud migration as a journey, not a single event. Meet applications where they are – modernizing everything to get to the cloud is not pragmatic. Take a platform-centric approach with self-service and hyper-automation. Recognize the shared responsibility model and test controls often. Invest in your workforce – not just engineers but also audit, legal, procurement. Run multicloud with muscle memory and a strong operational rhythm.
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Rajiv Ramaswami1:02:57
Thank you so much, Akshay. We're grateful to be partners. Give it up for Akshay.
That was a complex journey. We've talked about many innovations. Here's a summary of all the announcements. I invite you to breakout sessions. All these investments make Nutanix your platform for today and tomorrow. Many of you are dealing with VMware and Broadcom. They're forcing you to buy the full stack and will force you to adopt it, requiring new hardware and a changed operating model. That's a big lift. Is that what you want to invest in? They're focused on capturing profits, not innovation. We can help reduce your dependence and meet your needs with a modern platform. We have your back. Thank you from the bottom of my heart to our customers and to those who are not yet customers – we look forward to welcoming you.