In its move to the “invisible infrastructure,” Nutanix Inc. has been able to capitalize on a key shift in enterprise computing.

“Storage as we know it is going away, and we’re moving towards infrastructure as code, which is just a stepping stone to cloud. But I don’t see multi-cloud as a winner-take-all market,” said Dave Vellante (@dvellante) (pictured, left), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio.

Vellante and his co-host Stu Miniman (@stu) (pictured, right) discussed key impressions from day two at this week’s Nutanix .NEXT conference in Washington, D.C. Nutanix is “aiming high, they’re expanding into a couple of areas and they keep listening,” Miniman said.

Major competition is coming

But a “challenge tsunami” is about to engulf the cloud computing company as major firms begin to roll out new offerings. “Microsoft Azure Stack is coming this year,” said Miniman, the hybrid cloud offering that he views as a “huge potential threat.” He also questioned why he hasn’t “heard as much about [software as a service] applications living on Nutanix.”

Vellante and Miniman also discussed comparisons with VMware Inc., which became a major success with its platform virtualization technology over a decade ago. “The imperative for virtualization was so high in the 2000s and VMware was the only game in town. Is the imperative for multi-cloud the same?” Vellante asked.

Despite competitive and technology questions, both of theCUBE hosts noted the high levels of enthusiasm and interest in the Nutanix approach during the first two days of this week’s event, tempered by the perspective that more innovation is still to come.

“This is a long game. This change in the way that we do things is a journey,” Miniman said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT US 2017 event. (*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Nutanix .NEXT US. Neither Nutanix Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE