In an increasingly complex digital landscape, enterprises are navigating the dual imperatives of modernizing legacy applications for the cloud while simultaneously positioning themselves to capitalize on the transformative potential of artificial intelligence. This journey is often fraught with challenges, including prohibitive refactoring costs, operational inconsistencies between on-premises and cloud environments, and the technical hurdles of integrating established workloads with modern data services. Responding to this critical industry need, Google Cloud and Nutanix have announced a strategic partnership culminating in the general availability of Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Google Cloud. This collaboration is engineered to provide a direct, low-friction pathway for businesses to embrace a hybrid cloud model, enabling them to migrate and manage their applications seamlessly without extensive re-architecting, thereby accelerating their path toward becoming AI-ready organizations. The platform promises to unify operations, simplify infrastructure management, and unlock access to advanced cloud-native services.
A New Era for Hybrid Cloud Modernization
Seamless Application Migration and Mobility
The core value proposition of this collaboration is the profound simplification of moving applications to the cloud. By running the full Nutanix software stack directly on Google Compute Engine’s bare-metal infrastructure, the NC2 platform allows enterprises to migrate even their most critical, regulated, and specialized applications to Google Cloud without the costly and time-consuming process of rebuilding them. This capability is a game-changer for organizations with extensive investments in existing systems, as it preserves the application architecture while providing the benefits of cloud scalability and resilience. The platform facilitates true application mobility, enabling a fluid, bidirectional movement of workloads between on-premises Nutanix environments and Google Cloud. This empowers businesses to modernize their IT landscape at a pace that aligns with their strategic objectives and resource availability. This approach not only saves significant time and financial resources but also mitigates the risks associated with large-scale application transformation projects, ensuring business continuity and operational stability throughout the transition.
Unified Management and Operational Efficiency
A major obstacle in hybrid cloud adoption has traditionally been the complexity of managing disparate environments, which often requires separate tools, policies, and specialized skill sets. This partnership directly addresses that challenge by offering a unified management experience through a single interface, Nutanix Prism Central. This centralized control plane provides a consistent operational view across both on-premises data centers and Google Cloud deployments, allowing IT teams to leverage their existing Nutanix expertise without a steep learning curve. The ability to use the same tools and apply consistent security and governance policies across the entire hybrid infrastructure significantly reduces administrative overhead and lowers operational friction. Beyond unified management, this integration delivers powerful operational advantages. It enables seamless disaster recovery configurations between private and public clouds and gives organizations the flexibility to elastically scale their cloud capacity to handle peak demand or seasonal spikes. Furthermore, the portability of Nutanix licenses provides enterprises with greater control and predictability over their cloud investments, ensuring they can optimize costs while adapting to evolving business needs.
Paving the Way for Enterprise AI Integration
Accelerating Data-Driven Innovation
The strategic vision behind this partnership extends beyond infrastructure modernization to make enterprises fundamentally “AI-ready.” By bringing workloads onto Google Cloud via NC2, organizations can bridge the gap between their traditional applications and Google’s advanced ecosystem of data analytics and artificial intelligence services. Applications running within the Nutanix environment can now connect directly and with low latency to powerful platforms such as BigQuery, Google’s serverless data warehouse, and Vertex AI, its unified machine learning platform. This direct integration unlocks the ability to feed data from core business applications into sophisticated analytics pipelines and AI models without complex data engineering. For instance, businesses can now leverage their migrated application data to build, train, and deploy custom machine learning models or tap into the capabilities of state-of-the-art foundation models like Gemini Enterprise. This alignment transforms legacy systems from siloed operational tools into dynamic sources of insight, enabling data-driven decision-making and accelerating the development of innovative, AI-powered services.
A Strategic Leap Forward for Enterprise IT
To further simplify the adoption process, the integration extended into the commercial framework by making NC2 licensing available on the Google Cloud Marketplace. This move allowed customers to utilize their existing Google Cloud spending commitments to procure Nutanix software and services, streamlining procurement cycles and consolidating vendor management. The inclusion in the marketplace provided the added benefit of a single, unified bill from Google Cloud, which encompassed both infrastructure consumption and Nutanix licensing costs, thereby simplifying budget tracking and financial oversight. This final piece of the collaboration cemented a comprehensive solution that addressed the technical, operational, and commercial barriers to hybrid cloud adoption. By offering a direct path for application migration, unified cross-cloud management, and seamless integration with advanced AI services, the partnership ultimately provided a clear and compelling strategy for enterprises. It enabled them to not only modernize their IT infrastructure but also transform their core business applications into engines for data-driven innovation, marking a pivotal moment in their digital transformation journeys.
