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How we went from staying in cloud native conversations to now being able to lead them

We’re not your brother’s Kubernetes. Technology moves so fast now that saying “we’re not your father’s anything” no longer fits most timelines.

In five short years, Nutanix went from staying in cloud native conversations to now having the ability to lead them for many of our customers. That’s the shift in perception we are now experiencing. The  Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) solution puts us at the cutting edge for cloud native enterprise containerization–including all the necessary CSI drivers and API connections for persistent storage with our Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK) solution.

Don’t take my word for it, just check out the Forrester Wave 2025. The momentum is key as we recently made it into the top section as a Multicloud Container Platform Leader. We were also very strong in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Container Management. Our cloud native story has dramatically changed and we are fierce.

As a Senior Strategic Technical Marketing Engineer at  Nutanix for six years, I’ve witnessed this transformation first hand. Check out the following reasons why cloud native at Nutanix is as fierce as I’m suggesting.

From Understudy to Cloud Native Mainstage

First starting with the Nutanix Karbon release in 2019, we’ve been competing for cloud native containerization a number of times and in different ways. Consider us then as an understudy getting ready to enter the mainstage by observing and practicing. We stayed in this understudy role for cloud native conversations with Karbon and then renamed it as the Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (NKE) solution, while adding more capabilities and an integration framework.

Then by 2022 for more advanced cloud native conversations, we partnered with Red Hat to deliver a full stack enterprise containerization solution with Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform. Talk about great training for an understudy, we were coupled with a leading K8s solution in the industry as a preferred infrastructure to run on.

Fast forward to 2024 and we entered the mainstage more solidly by acquiring the products and IP of D2IQ, Inc, which brought us the functionality that would have taken us years to build. So now with all the experience we’ve gained and the help of some terrific folks from D2IQ who joined Nutanix, we have our own native solution for cloud native enterprise containerization.

What about OpenShift?

OpenShift became very popular with the developer community–running in public clouds with stateless apps and a DevOps mandate to deliver code faster regardless of how and where. It also runs on VMware vSphere environments, which were common among enterprise customers. I’m sure most folks reading this are aware of the change in market dynamics after VMware was acquired by Broadcom. The turmoil has provided  new opportunities for many vendors including Red Hat and Nutanix.

Red Hat sellers had many ways to close a deal after the partnership with Nutanix was announced in 2022. Sometimes they included Nutanix but other times they didn’t by also pitching bare metal instead of hypervisor virtualization. The key point is that we at least gained critical narratives about having a full stack enterprise containerization story with Red Hat and us. It was exciting. I remember being at a meeting during our sales kickoff after we announced the Nutanix-Red Hat partnership and one of the members of our Red Hat “tiger team” said, “Nutanix is what OpenStack was supposed to be.” This was another understudy phase of our cloud native efforts as we got ready to step onto the mainstage with a platform of our own.

What about VMware Tanzu®️?

As you can imagine for me on the Competitive Team at Nutanix, the arc of Tanzu marketing from inception until now has been topsy turvy in every way but frankly has never been a competitive threat. Ok, to be fair, there were times I was a little nervous but it faded away as time has passed.

For example a couple years ago, during VMworld, now turned VMware Explore, Tanzu was mentioned in every keynote and in many of the sessions, much like AI, agentic AI, and gen AI are mentioned at every major IT industry conference now. So Tanzu has had its moments and still might be formidable as they continue to rehone how it ends up in the hands of customers. VMware first came out with a complicated set of editions for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG). At that point, a lot of customers were actually running OpenShift in these environments.

As revealed at  VMware Explore 2025, Tanzu has taken yet another shift. Parts of the functionality are now part of VMware Cloud Foundation™️ (VCF), including VMware Tanzu Mission Control in VCF Automation, and instead of VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), VCF now has vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) that is using the functionality that used to be part of the Tanzu business unit. They are using the Tanzu brand for VMware Tanzu Data Intelligence.

Stay tuned (or not)--this lack of stability for me is not surprising, as I have been following them ever since the Pivotal acquisition.

Leading Cast for Cloud Native with NKP

After Nutanix’s acquisition of D2IQ’s products, everything came together with our combined capabilities to help us lead in conversations about enterprise containerization. We just merged in the functionality with our emerging Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (NKE) solution and now have a much stronger story that is now delivered natively. This is our current NKP solution, plus improvements along the way.

We believe NKP now is in good company with OpenShift, VMware and others - in that Nutanix now delivers a strong  cloud native solution. This all happened by a curious set of circumstances that brought us together. D2IQ was already considered a formidable solution in several large enterprises and government accounts. As the market for cloud native containerization at the enterprise level shifted, vendors and customers realized that they needed a better solution for storage. Containerization efforts switched from mainly stateless apps to more stateful apps that needed storage. Having a reliable storage partner would be key for enterprise containerization and specifically D2IQ’s customers. We could not be a better fit for enterprise containerization storage and now we’re together with D2IQ’s customers and NKP.

What Makes Nutanix Cloud Native Strong (or Fierce)

Industry-Leading Storage

Let’s admit, Nutanix is known for our storage solution, particularly a hyperconverged storage, compute, and networking solution. Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) is what we’ve been known for, and for our hugely popular End-user computing (EUC) solution on HCI. Cloud native was not in the mix but that is changing rapidly. As the need for more stateful apps running in containers emerged, our HCI solution makes sense for containerized apps and why Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform was such a natural partner fit  with us two years ago. Nutanix combined with D2IQ’s products met the need too and the timing and collaboration could not have been better for both of us. Now, add to that our comprehensive storage options with the Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) solution and use cases for the Nutanix Database Service (NDB) database management solution, and we have all the ingredients for one of the most compelling cloud native solutions on the market today.

Platform Engineering Focus

We learned from our years of pitching to various decision makers for cloud native initiatives. IT admins often are overloaded keeping existing systems running and may not have the bandwidth to invest time learning a bunch of new stuff. Developers want to move fast, often building their own stacks with open-source tools and pushing code without waiting on IT admins to approve their resources. Without guard rails, there can be a lot of inconsistency across the organization where developers on one team used one set of tools or versions of tools, such as CNCF open source tools, and others do something completely different. This is how the role of a platform engineer emerged. This mish mash of approaches was no longer scalable for the growing production ready containerization that needs to be backed up efficiently and monitored and updated in a more prudent manner. Platform engineers help organizations standardize how K8s environments are deployed and managed, while still giving developers the flexibility they need. This is exactly what NKP does.

Choice and No Forking

Another reason Nutanix is gaining momentum is that we run Rancher, we run OpenShift, we run EKS, and we run any upstream CNCF compatible distribution of K8s without forking.. What that means is that as long as the containerization and K8's distribution does not have any proprietary dependencies, the portability of the microservices running in a particular environment can run and migrate to wherever they are needed. There’s also a choice of where to run NKP as a control plane but also where to deploy clusters on premises or in public clouds. Any invested relationships with any vendor that customers don’t want to let go of are still there and most likely supported by NKP’s vast ecosystem. Our value is achieved by both tailoring current investments and our platform engineering focus so organizations have all the tools they need to deliver the environment necessary for developers to be super productive. All of this comes without vendor lock in.

Momentum Building for Cloud Native and Beyond

Then there is the Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI) solution and we just keep going. Check out this post with a similar theme of where we’ve been and where we’re going Nutanix: A Rising Star in the New AI Infrastructure Landscape. We’re all hands on deck here at Nutanix and practically climbing all over each other with new ways to get all of this to market effectively. Check out these Nutanix University videos here.

Here's a quick example of how things are going. One of our account teams was working with a customer on their refresh cycles for hardware and storage and diligently asked about their containerization initiatives. The outcome? The customer was able to get NKP up and running as a standalone solution quickly as part of their overall data center strategy. That is all while keeping tabs on when to get the Nutanix clusters running during their next hardware refresh.

With Nutanix’s portfolio and sales teams hitting full stride in this landscape, our sales teams can deliver strategic and practical advice in more ways with portfolio options that meet the customer wherever they are in their hybrid cloud, app modernization, cloud first or smart, infrastructure upgrade, AI, or whatever strategy they are in at the moment.

There you have it, that’s why Nutanix Cloud Native is fierce. 

To find out more check out the following:

©️2025 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo and all Nutanix product and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Nutanix, Inc. is not affiliated with VMware by Broadcom or Broadcom. VMware and the various VMware product names recited herein are registered or unregistered trademarks of Broadcom in the United States and/or other countries. Red Hat and OpenShift are registered trademarks or trademarks of Red Hat,  Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. Kubernetes is a registered trademark of The Linux Foundation in the United States and other countries. All other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s).

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