Two strategic announcements emerged from Wednesday’s Nutanix .NEXT conference keynote in Washington, D.C., involving how Nutanix Inc. will approach the hybrid cloud.

When the first .NEXT conference was held two years ago, Nutanix “sort of teased us with a vision of cloud. Today, we saw that vision come into a little bit more clarity,”said Dave Vellante (@dvellante) (pictured, left), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio.

The company announced a new cloud service called Xi, a disaster recovery tool for use throughout the hybrid cloud environment, including Nutanix’s own on-premise products. Xi won’t ship until the first half of next year, and pricing details have not been released, according to Stu Miniman (@stu) (pictured, right), co-host of theCUBE.

The question for Miniman is still: “How does Nutanix get to be more than just an on-prem infrastructure layer?”

Multicloud tools announced

The second announcement during Wednesday’s keynote was about Nutanix Calm, which is designed to take advantage of technology from the acquisition of Calm.io last year. Calm provides a dashboard that addresses the difficulty of managing multicloud environments.

“Everybody is trying to solve this problem. Nutanix is a small player. They’ve got some good pieces they are starting to touch,” Miniman said.

The release of new details surrounding Xi and Calm comes against the backdrop of yesterday’s news that Google’s parent Alphabet Inc. will integrate Nutanix technology into Google Cloud.

“They’re going to take that full Nutanix stack and make it available in Google data centers around the world, and we expect them to expand those partnerships,” Miniman said. “The Google announcement gives Nutanix credibility.”

Both analysts discussed the debate within the information technology community about “lift and shift,” whether new technologies will make it easier to move applications between platforms.

“Porting something over is not easy, and it’s one of the points that Nutanix is making,” Miniman concluded.

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