The so-called single pane of glass for managing multicloud environments remains largely an information technology admin’s fantasy. Whether or not it ever materializes is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, could a holistic enterprise cloud operating system be the next best thing?

“The enterprise doesn’t have a good operating system,” said Binny Gill (pictured, left), chief architect at Nutanix Inc. An ideal operating system for enterprises with multicloud infrastructure would provide a homebase for downloading and deploying applications, he explained.

Providing this OS has become Nutanix’s chief goal, Gill said in an interview during the Nutanix .NEXT EU event in Nice, France. Gill and Aaditya Sood (pictured, right), senior director of engineering and products at Nutanix, spoke to Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

Does this mean that Nutanix is walking away from its hyperconverged infrastructure business? HCI is still alive and well in the Nutanix portfolio, but the enterprise OS represents an important step forward, according to Gill.

“HCI was sort of the hammer that we needed to use to get rid of the legacy,” he said. That legacy would be traditional three-tier architecture and its accompanying mindset.

No silver bullet, but …

The key pivot into the OS domain was the integration of application management acquisition Calm.io. Calm.io is a single place from which admins can manage applications running in dispersed environments, update systems and complete other tasks. This makes it an operating system in a sense, Gill explained. “I don’t buy parts of an OS from different companies. It’s one OS,” he said.

Information technology environments today are so fractured, it is not realistic to expect any one service to glue them together, according to Sood. “There is no silver bullet for any of this. There are tradeoffs involved,” he said.

But however many clouds and apps there are, a single overlay can give admins eyes to see them. “Yes, there is going to be AWS, there is going to be GCP, but on top of this, a single layer can be built, which can go ahead and allow the applications to abstract those parts […],” Sood said. Based on feedback from early users, Calm.io as an enterprise operating system can remove 80 to 90 percent of complexity from multicloud management, Sood stated.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Nutanix .NEXT EU. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Nutanix .NEXT EU event. Neither Nutanix Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE