On the last day of the Nutanix .NEXT Conference event for this year, some unpacking and analysis of announcements and presentations made so far in the conference was in order, and theCUBE’s team was on the ground to assess the state of things.

Stu Miniman (@stu) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, kicked off the final day of the event by discussing the day’s keynote presentations and analyze how the insights tied into the information delivered in the previous days.

Partners and mergers

As Vellante noted, partnerships were a key aspect of the keynote presentations, with Microsoft serving as one of the biggest pieces in those talks. Whether Nutanix, Inc. will properly utilize the tools at its disposal in its partnership with Microsoft will be an important factor in how things move forward. But Miniman also felt that relations with Dell, Inc. would be significant, particularly once the Dell-EMC merger is fully resolved.

“At its core, it’s very clear when you listen to Michael Dell — what he considers important to the company,” Miniman said, making sure to clarify that while some industry analysts were concerned about the effect the merger would be having on Dell’s business ties, announcements had been made to make certain that its relationship with Nutanix will continue after the merger’s completion.

Making their own value

Apart from those invaluable partnerships, Miniman highlighted the “many paths to market” for Nutanix to take in its challenge to VMware, Inc.’s domination of virtual utilities. Vellante pointed out that Nutanix needs to carefully manage its OEM revenue, to make sure that they keep its percentage in its profits down. But he did feel that, so far, the company seems to be doing a good job of handling that aspect.

More concerning was the one-on-one confrontation of Nutanix and VMware, though interviewees at the conference had been careful to note the efforts made to allow for interoperability. “A lot of Nutanix’s customers are still doing VMware,” Miniman said. And while “most customers are going to have more than one hypervisor,” as he noted, there’s still going to be significant friction arising from the struggle for marketshare and customer exposure.

Miniman felt that part of this would play out in the companies developing their ease-of-use to higher quality, in design, implementation and interface aspects, saying, “The easier it is, and the higher up the stack I go, we actually see exponential value to the customer.”

Feedback and maturations

In reacting to the announcements of the day, Miniman assessed the situation as one in which maturing the services would likely emerge as one of the biggest keys at the end of the conference, moving forward into the rest of the fiscal year. But beyond that, the disconnect between on-prem and cloud data would become more evident as each one developed distinct solutions.

“All the enterprises that have on-prem as their service model are struggling to deal with AWS [and similar services],” Miniman said, and while it’s unclear at this point how those disjunctions will be resolved, there are clear rewards for the company that can find a way.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT Conference 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE