Nutanix in Italy, dual vendor strategy and VMware migration drive the market
The Italian IT infrastructure market is undergoing a phase of reevaluation. The combination of contract deadlines, cost pressures, and the need to modernize technology stacks for AI workloads is leading companies to consider a dual vendor strategy more attentively. This is the insight shared by Albert Zammar, country manager of Nutanix in Italy, during his first meeting with the Italian press since taking over the branch, aimed at summarizing market priorities and contextualizing the international announcements presented at .Next in Chicago.
At .Next in Chicago a few weeks prior, Nutanix outlined a broad package of announcements centered around four major directions. For artificial intelligence, the new Agentic AI Platform for managing agents on infrastructure and certified integration with MongoDB as a vector database for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems. For cloud-native applications, NKP Metal, the version of Nutanix Kubernetes Platform that runs containers directly on bare metal. For data and storage, the new version of Unified Storage and DataLens. For multicloud, availability in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, enhancement of multi-tenant mode for service providers, and the alliance with NetApp to natively host ONTAP within the stack. Edge9 attended the event and reported on it in a series of in-depth articles dedicated to it in the following days. The meeting with the Italian press aimed to translate those announcements into the perspective of the local market.
The backdrop is the Enterprise Cloud Index 2026, the annual survey commissioned by Nutanix to Wakefield Research, conducted this year in November 2025 on 1,600 IT executives from fourteen countries, including Italy, all from companies with more than 500 employees. Two main points emerge at the top of the priority list: the demand for sovereign cloud, with data governance staying under local control, and the difficulty in managing organizational silos, amplifying the risks related to AI adoption. These same issues have been reflected in Zammar's conversations with Italian customers.
The demand for a second option is growing. The shift towards a dual vendor strategy, Zammar explained, is driven by customers rather than vendors, resting on two mutually reinforcing reasons. On one hand, review of pricing policies of incumbents and changes in support management have led many companies to feel less supported than before. On the other hand, and for the country manager the more solid element, is the need to modernize infrastructures to host container applications, AI agents, and modern databases.
"A pricing strategy can always be negotiated," the manager noted, "what is non-negotiable is the willingness to modernize infrastructures and equip oneself with platforms ready for future workloads."
The deadline set by Broadcom for the migration to VMware Cloud Foundation 9, November 2027, is accelerating the assessment. Those who did not act in the early phases following the acquisition of VMware now have limited margins for planning, if not a complete replacement, at least a cohabitation. Nutanix has made available free professional services to support the migration and reduce the impact on internal resources or external system integrators. The company's proposal aims to position itself as a single vendor capable of natively managing virtual machines, containers, certified databases, and data tiering within the same platform. A point, the manager emphasized, that is particularly relevant for medium to large companies, where the IT structure is intricate enough to make lock-in a concrete problem.
The most active sectors and priorities for the Italian branch. The demand for alternatives is not uniform across all sectors. The most receptive sectors confirm to be central and local public administrations, supported by the investment cycle opened by the PNRR, and regulated sectors such as banks and insurance, for which data sovereignty and the ability to manage structured and unstructured information on the same platform have become operational requirements. Manufacturing, services, and commerce join in, with the Italian specificity of a mid-market where partners like NetApp, integrated into the Nutanix platform thanks to the agreement announced in Chicago, boast a historical penetration. Smaller companies, on the other hand, remain more lukewarm, as on limited volumes, supplier diversification has less impact on costs and lock-in risks.
The infrastructure renewal programs are also impacted by a factor that the country manager did not overlook: the hardware shortage. This is a problem affecting the entire IT sector, not just Nutanix, but for now, it is not leading to project cancellations in Italy. Delivery times are increasing and there is a revitalization of the refurbished market, with machines that until recently were planned to be replaced in three to five years now returning to production. Several vendors are nonetheless introducing priority lists and standard configurations deliverable in two or three weeks, a response that Zammar sees as a sign of the supply chain adapting to procurement constraints.
To these premises, Zammar linked three priorities for the Italian branch, continuing the mandate received upon his joining: growth, profitability, and organizational completion. The closing fiscal year, the country manager said, "looks promising," with a positive derivative to be consolidated in the next fiscal years. From an organizational standpoint, Nutanix maintains two branches in Italy, in Milan and Rome, and an Inside Sales hub in Barcelona, with territorial coverage across five areas: Lombardy, northeast, northwest, central, and southern regions, in addition to a team dedicated to central public administration based in the capital. A structure that, the manager hinted, is destined to expand across all departments to support the expected growth trend in the coming fiscal years.