Cloud rebalancing gives service providers a new edge

The post-Broadcom Inc. The shockwave is creating an opportunity to redefine the cloud, and service providers are racing to take advantage of it.

The disruption is growing as Broadcom’s consolidation of VMware’s partner base leaves many service providers looking for new platform options. Nutanix Inc. is moving to fill that gap with its recently announced Service Provider Central offering and the expanded Elevate program, according to Sachin Chheda (pictured, left), vice president of strategic partnerships, service providers and program integrators, at Nutanix.

“Broadcom has put a number of these service providers out there. They’ve consolidated their base into a very small group of partners, and many of the partners that were cut off have no choice,” Chheda told CUBE. “They have to look at what they have to do to continue managing their businesses. For them, it’s probably an existing challenge that they have to look at.”

Chheda and Bryan Smith (right), Expedient’s CEO, spoke with CUBE’s John Furrier and Nutanix .NEXT partner Alison Kosik, during an exclusive broadcast on CUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s live streaming studio. They discussed cloud recovery strategies and how the Nutanix platform allows service providers to host displaced VMware customers. (* Disclosure below.)

The rebalancing of cloud and AI is driving the opportunity for the service provider

The infrastructure-or-AI debate is over. Businesses now want both, integrated together and delivering measurable results, according to Smith. The winning service providers are those that can deliver infrastructure as a service around managed AI – and the numbers prove it as Nutanix’s service provider grows. Appropriately, a managed infrastructure and AI services provider running on the Nutanix platform, has dramatically grown its new customer base over the past year, as AI-as-a-service leads are now resulting in broader infrastructure deals.

“Just in the last year, we’ve doubled the number of new logos we measure as a company, and those were from AI-as-a-service first, and now we’re seeing them bleed into infrastructure,” said Smith. “Having a unified platform that can do all the different parts really helps speed things up from our side because we’re not developing the technology, we’re the guardians of the technology.”

Migration speed becomes a competitive differentiator. Expedient has completed more than 400 migrations in the past year with only one reversal on the first attempt, Smith noted. Once customers have migrated, data becomes the basis for scaling to AI-enabled workflows and cloud rescaling, where workloads are matched to the right environment instead of being automated at hyperscale.

“People look at hyperscale in general [that] they buy the things they choose, they buy the flexibility, but the responsibility of most companies is not flexible,” said Smith.

Here’s the full video interview, part of SiliconANGLE and CUBE covering Nutanix .NEXT 2026:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner of Nutanix .NEXT 2026. The CUBE event sponsors have no editorial control over content on The CUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE