AI, Data Sovereignty, and Infrastructure Freedom at the Center of .NEXT On Tour Rome, Nutanix's Italian Event
AI, Hybrid Multicloud, and Sovereignty: Infrastructure is No Longer a Commodity
For years, the data center has primarily been viewed as an efficiency problem: consolidate, simplify, reduce operational complexity. All true. But today, the landscape has expanded.
Infrastructure has become the intersection point for choices regarding data sovereignty, service resilience, protection against ransomware, cost management, and the ability to adopt AI without losing control of workloads.
"The topic of sovereignty is becoming increasingly central for all IT managers, both in the private sector and, even more so, in the public administration," says Marco Del Plato, Senior Systems Engineer Manager at Nutanix. This is particularly evident when discussing artificial intelligence. Models do not exist in abstraction; they require data, computing power, application environments, orchestration, security, and policies. In many cases, they rely on containers and cloud-native platforms. In others, they must remain close to the data for reasons of latency, compliance, or information governance. This gives rise to the need for infrastructure capable of managing diverse environments without forcing the company to choose between innovation and control.
At .NEXT on Tour Rome, Nutanix and its partners will delve into these topics. The morning will be dedicated to strategic vision and discussion on major themes redefining enterprise IT: software-defined architectures, hybrid cloud, AI, sovereign cloud, cyber-resilience, data protection and valorization, and new models of digital workplace. The afternoon will focus on technical deep-dives, with sessions centered on infrastructure modernization, database management, AI in real-world scenarios, security, and operational continuity.
Less Lock-in, More Freedom of Choice
The market for virtualization and enterprise infrastructure is undergoing a phase of redefinition. Many companies are evaluating alternative or complementary strategies to traditional setups, not to chase novelty, but to reduce dependence on rigid architectures, complex contracts, or roadmaps that are not always aligned with customer needs.
Freedom of choice is becoming an increasingly important element in business strategies, and companies wish to manage virtualized, containerized workloads, databases, and AI environments across different infrastructures, whether on-premise, in the public cloud, or on hybrid and multicloud infrastructures. They are searching for a model that allows them to execute each workload where it makes the most sense, while maintaining control, security, and simplicity: the issue of digital sovereignty is not just about where data is physically located. It pertains to who governs it, the tools used to protect information, and how easy it is to move, integrate, recover, and use it.
This is also why Broadcom's acquisition of VMware has reopened a discussion that many companies had long considered closed. Virtualization remains a critical component of the enterprise data center, and no one rewrites over time-built infrastructures overnight. However, the change in commercial approach, shifting to subscription-based models and more concentrated packages, has led many IT departments to reassess costs, dependencies, and maneuvering margins. It’s not just a hypervisor issue. It’s about operational, contractual, and architectural dependence: enterprises are seeking platforms capable of managing virtual machines, containers, databases, and AI workloads more flexibly, distributing loads where it makes the most sense.
Databases, Containers, and AI: The Technical Heart of Transformation
One of the focuses of the event will be data management. Databases remain one of the most delicate assets in enterprise IT: they are critical for applications, costly to manage, complex to protect, and increasingly central in AI and analytics projects. Therefore, the ability to manage them with ease, without compromising on regulatory compliance, is fundamentally important for a successful transformation.
The same principle applies to containerization, a technology born in response to the need to make application development and release processes more agile, which today is also fundamental in AI projects where models, microservices, pipelines, and scalable environments need to be managed. In this context, the hybrid multicloud approach is the ideal response, ensuring the necessary flexibility.
As Del Plato explains, "In fact, AI is a workload closely tied to the world of containerization. Customers are increasingly keen on having a dual vendor strategy from an infrastructure perspective, and the world of containerization is also asking us for this type of approach. They intend to adopt it, depending on the case, on on-premise infrastructure or in the cloud."
.NEXT on Tour Rome aims to bring together two levels: vision and operationality. On one hand, the role of infrastructure in the new digital enterprise. On the other hand, the technical choices that allow reducing complexity, improving resilience, protecting data, and making AI usable in concrete scenarios.