The .NEXT annual conference for Nutanix Inc. is being held in Anaheim, California, this week, mere steps away from Disneyland, so it was only a mild surprise when attendees saw the “Star Wars” films’ Luke Skywalker, played by actor Mark Hamill, on the keynote stage.

Hamill’s appearance drove home an important point for the company. Its customers, technically elite and pushing the envelope in DevOps, like to take chances. And Nutanix is more than happy to help the enterprise cause.

“Their customer base is a lot like the Jedi order,” said John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the second day of the .NEXT event in Anaheim, California, referencing the noble protectors in the “Star Wars” universe. “They’re smart, they’re usually engineering-oriented and love engineered solutions, and they’re taking chances. They want to take the playbook of hyperconverged infrastructure and apply it to the cloud, provide an abstraction layer advantage. That is clearly their strategy, and that’s the top story here.”

Furrier was joined by Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-host of theCUBE, and they discussed Nutanix’s approach to simplifying infrastructure management and how trends in the DevOps movement could work in the company’s favor (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Feeling the one-click force

Through tools such as Prism, Nutanix has brought one-click infrastructure management for running virtualized environments. In a release this week, the company announced the new Nutanix Mine integration, which provides the ability to manage multiple workloads from a single console.

“This is a real coming of age moment for them,” Knight said. “Customers want this one-click data recovery. They want credentials to know who I am and that I’m safe to be in here. Simplicity is key.”

Despite customer zeal and the simplicity of its products, Nutanix has found itself on the investment roller coaster since turning public, with the stock dropping 18% in the past year. However, there are some dynamics in the enterprise marketplace that the investment community might overlook.

“There’s a big tailwind coming for Nutanix around DevOps and operating models in the enterprise and cloud with the convergence of those two worlds,” Furrier said. “It’s going to be a younger generation. If that happens, I think that’s something that Wall Street might not see.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the .NEXT 2019 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the .NEXT conference. Neither Nutanix Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Nutanix Inc.