When it comes to managing workloads and applications in a hybrid-cloud world, Nutanix Inc. has borrowed a slogan popularized by one well-known athletic brand: Just do it.

Nutanix announced an extension of its Clusters scale-out hyperconverged storage offering that will now be available on the Amazon Web Services Inc. platform and provide customers with a true hybrid-cloud management solution.

“You want to move workloads into public cloud? Do it,” said Monica Kumar (pictured, left), senior vice president of product and solutions marketing at Nutanix. “You want to keep something on-premises? Do it. If you want to develop in the cloud, do it. If you want to keep production on-prem, do it. It’s a single management plane and seamless mobility.”

Kumar spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, as part of the Nutanix special announcement event. She was joined by Tarkan Maner (pictured, right), chief commercial officer of Nutanix, and they discussed Nutanix’s lengthy experience in HCI, meeting customer needs for cost reduction and scalability, how Clusters provides a flexible architecture, the value of an extensive partner network, and the firm’s competitive position in the hyperconverged infrastructure space. (* Disclosure below.)

Going to the next level

Founded in 2009, Nutanix built its reputation in HCI by combining data-center hardware and storage with intelligent software. Nutanix Clusters integrates into public-cloud accounts to allow users the flexibility for running applications, improving performance and reducing complexity.

“Nutanix wrote the book in digital infrastructure with its own converged-infrastructure story,” Maner said. “Now we’re taking that to the next level with our data center, DevOps and user compute solutions in a multicloud fashion, working with partners like AWS.”

IDC’s quarterly storage tracker places Nutanix in second for the HCI market, behind only Dell Technologies Inc./VMware Inc. In a July report issued by Forrester Research Inc., Nutanix was positioned as a leader in the HCI space, with one of the highest scores across categories of current offerings, market presence and strategy.

The firm’s latest moves with AWS and Clusters are in line with several current trends within the HCI ecosystem. These include a need for organizations to reduce costs on overhead, such as power and cooling, and the consolidation of infrastructure to improve scale.

“What’s top-of-mind is how to use cloud for innovation but really be intelligent about cost optimization,” Kumar said. “With this announcement, we’re making hybrid cloud a reality across public and private cloud, but also making sure customers get the cost efficiency they need when they’re deploying the solution.”

Cost effective and scalable

Cost efficiency is very much a central focus for enterprise executives in these unusual times. Supply-chain disruption and a sharp reduction in travel have affected multiple industries, including hospitality and airlines.

“One of the airline executives told me: ‘Look, Tarkan, in the next 12 months my business might be half of what it is today, and I need to do more with less,’” Maner recalled. “Being able to move workloads from location to location, cost optimize those, provide streamlined operations, making the apps and the data related to those apps mobile, and provide built-in networking capabilities, all of those make it easier for them to cut costs. It’s a tough time.”

Improving capacity and scale is an important mission for many businesses around the world. One Nutanix customer is an Australian organization that holds a major event every five years that requires outreach to 24 million people.

“Imagine if they have to keep the capacity on-site anticipating the needs for five years in a row; they can’t do that,” Kumar explained. “They’re getting ready with our Clusters to really expand virtual desktop infrastructure environments into the cloud in a big way with AWS. That’s when you have event-driven capacity bursting into the cloud.”

Flexible and easier to use

This kind of scale and capacity in event-driven situations is made possible through a flexible architecture that facilitates virtual-machine visibility. Customers can also use Amazon credits and bring on-prem Nutanix licenses to AWS, according to Kumar.

“The way we’ve architected Clusters with AWS is through built-in native network integration,” Kumar said. “You can literally see the Nutanix virtual machines in the same space as Amazon virtual machines. It’s really easy then to use other AWS services.”

Ease of use is a key driver in Nutanix’s latest solution with AWS, as companies increasingly turn to multicloud operating models. An IBM survey found that 98% of organizations plan to operate within a multicloud environment by 2021, yet only 41% have a multicloud strategy in place.

Nutanix’s solution with AWS is designed to help move that process along for customers.

“How do I burst and scale my VDI environment or database environment into the cloud?” Kumar asked. “That’s clearly one use case that many of our customers want to be able to do simply and without having to incur the extreme complexity of managing these environments. We are really simplifying multicloud complexity for our customers, and that’s what Nutanix is doing with this announcement.”

Nutanix is also drawing on its extensive partner network to provide support for customers seeking new solutions for IT operating environments. Since April, the company announced a partnership with Avid Technology Inc. to run its HCI software with Media Composer and an alliance with Wipro Ltd. to provide efficiencies in database management.

In June, Nutanix announced that it would expand its integration with digital workflow company ServiceNow Inc. to help customers streamline IT operations and costs.

“We have a tremendous level of partner support,” Maner noted. “The ecosystem makes it so much easier for our customers.”

Data released last fall by Enterprise Technology Research showed that competition in the HCI market had settled into a two-horse race between Nutanix and VMware. Nutanix’s latest partnership with AWS and hints from both executives about future announcements are clearly designed to ensure the market will remain highly competitive.

“This is only the beginning for us,” Kumar said. “We may not have been the first to market, but we believe we’re the best in market for this space today.”

Watch the complete video interview covering the Nutanix special announcement below. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for this special announcement from Nutanix Inc. Neither Nutanix, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE