I was once again luckily enough to be invited to Nutanix’s .NEXT conference, this time in Washington DC, USA. Here’s what I got up to.

 

Day 1

 I flew out of London Heathrow on the Tuesday and got to the hotel quite late. I was lucky to stay at the Marriott Marquis Hotel, Washington DC. The hotel has a connecting walk through to the Walter E Washington Conference Centre where Nutanix .NEXT was due to be held. 

 

 

Day 2

 After the initial registration I went for a wander around the Solutions Expo which has many of the shows sponsors giving demos, competitions (normally for some big Lego kit). 

 

 

I then attended a few sessions including:

• Migration to Nutanix: Your Blueprint for Moving from VMware to Nutanix
• General keynote session – which covered the following announcements:
• External storage integration Dell Powerflex and Pure Storage
• EUC Ecosystem Expansion into Omnissa Horizon and Citriix
• Cloud Native AOS
• Production ready Agentic AI including Nvidia NIM and Nemo models
• NC2 on AWS,  Azure and now on Google Cloud
• Further options for air gapped environments
• Meet the MCX engineers

During the general keynote there was an interview with award winning chef and author Jose Andres, who talked about his vision and projects aimed at making the world a better place through food.

 

 

There was also the option to do certifications during the day which I took advantage of and passed my NCP-MCI. 

As I’m part of the Multi Cloud Experts I was invited that evening to drinks and food at Succotash Prime in Washington DC.

 

Day 3

On this day I attended the following sessions:

• General keynote session 2 – which covered the following:
• Live demos and insights from technical experts at Nutanix
• Supercharge Nutanix Move: Automated Migrations in Beast Mode
• Nutanix Disaster Recovery unleashed
• EUC at Scale: Leveraging Nutanix for High Performance e Workloads
• Mastering Migration to Nutanix: Strategies, Tools, and Best Practices
• General Keynote Session 3 – which covered the following:
• Talks with customers, sharing their Nutanix stories and journeys

The keynote also featured a talk by Ivy Poumpouras, a former secret service agent and interrogator who spoke about communication skills that we can use when talking to business customers. 

 

 

Afterwards was the .NEXT celebration which was a massive party featuring live DJ, people roller skating, skipping, trick bike riders, fake tattoos, graffiti sprayed baseball hats, and more (too much to list). There was so much food and drink and so many different things to do. Its always an amazing party at the end of the Nutanix .NEXT.

 

 

Day 4

I attended the last couple of sessions:

• Successful Lab Deployments on Nutanix Community Edition
• AHV Performance Deep Dive

I also managed to get some time to go for a walk and visit the White House, the Washington monument, the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam memorial wall before I jetted off home.

 

 

Overall I had a great time, getting to go to the USA for the first time, learning more about Nutanix, getting certified whilst there and meeting other fellow Multi Cloud Experts. I would like to thank Carmen Martinez Pepin and Dinah Schukat for the invite and for all they did whilst I was there. Here’s hoping to NEXT year! 😉