Today’s keynote said it all. Nutanix employees opened Nutanix.NEXT Conference 2016 at the Winn, in Las Vegas to the song “We are the Champions” and in a display of teamwork we were welcomed and introduced by the people who make the company tick.

A journey to enterprise cloud

Howard Ting, chief marketing officer of Nutanix, Inc., commenced the event by talking about the company’s goal of creating an enterprise cloud. He cited a survey from the research firm Gartner noting about 40 percent of IT professionals interviewed believe they are building an alternative to AWS (Amazon Web Services), but in reality, the number that actually are doing it stands at about 7 percent.

We’re on this journey to build an enterprise cloud. Nutanix is clearly on this journey, we are not at the destination. We have far more capabilities that we need to build in our product, said Ting.

What enterprise cloud means

“Enterprise cloud means it is for the enterprise, meaning it is safe, resilient and able to run all your applications — not just your virtual, but all your applications. It needs to be cloud, which means it needs to … have the efficiency of cloud. And it needs to be a platform … where vendors co-create, so we can deliver more value to you,” Ting explained.

Ting goes on to say building the platform on the customers’ terms are key. Nutanix wants customers to buy it the way they want, run it on the servers they want and connect it to any public cloud they want. “This is what you are going to hear throughout the conference, the enterprise platform on your terms,” revealed Ting.

Creating lightbulb moments

Nutanix Chairman and CEO, Dheeraj Pandey, came on stage next to discuss the growth and leadership of the company. He began by talking about Nutanix commitment to the customer, relaying that as the company doubled in size, its Net Promoter Score, (an index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures customer satisfaction) went from somewhere in the seventies to a 92.

“The big reason for that is our obsession with the front line itself; we never give up, we’ve actually failed some of our customers and our systems have actually crashed … but we are really all about people and that is what has created one of the fastest growing infrastructure companies on the face of this planet,” claimed Pandey.

In reference to creating light bulb moments at time when the business is busy trying to keep the lights on, he feels that finding this balance within the company is really what will help Nutanix during its time of growth.

The next billion-dollar feature

Pandey reveals that one his favorite projects is the one-click upgrade. He said it is an ambitious idea, especially when it comes to lifecycle management of applications, firmware and everything that we see as a software in a system upgraded by one click across the system. “This is our next billion-dollar feature,” he declared.

The CEO believes on an everyday basis, his team is getting deeper and deeper into what it means to be invisible. Pandey goes through what it will take to get there and, in the end, he believes it is all about the platform and collaboration in order for everything to work together.

Revolutionizing with one click and invisibility

Raja Mukhopadhyay, vice president of product management at Nutanix, Inc. was next to speak. He opened by saying the best infrastructure is the one you never have to touch. He discussed the technology improvements in the company’s hypervisor offerings that allow invisible runtime, and the customer success stories that go along with these upgrades.

Mukhopadhyay also spoke about one of the major new things the company is doing by putting containers back onto the Nutanix platform. The newest release will now provide one-click provisioning and support for containers.

Also important to the company is that the invisible runtime and the one-click capabilities are upgradable on the full stack.  He said that one-click is the differentiator of this product and that it will remove friction for the user and will be the key to democratizing access up the stack.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE