.NEXT on Tour London: AI-ready cloud strategy

Retailers seek cloud infrastructure clarity as AI demands intensify, Miya Knights, Publisher, Retail Technology magazine, discovered recently

Nutanix brought its .NEXT on Tour roadshow to London late last month, drawing technology leaders—including retailers—keen to understand how hybrid multicloud infrastructure is evolving in the era of rapid artificial intelligence (AI) adoption. 

The sessions and customer stories made one point unmistakably clear: AI's commercial impact will depend entirely on whether organisations can run it cost-effectively, securely and predictably across datacentres, clouds and the edge.

A highlight of the programme was a candid customer conversation with Norsk Global, a logistics specialist whose services underpin the delivery promises of major retail brands. 

Norsk handles cross-border ecommerce shipments, carrier integrations, customs flows, returns and duty-paid fulfilment, all of which rely on resilient, low-latency IT infrastructure. If Norsk's IT platform falters, retailers face delayed deliveries, broken application programming interfaces (APIs), and customer service escalations.

Modernisation as a retail Imperative

Nick Andrews, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Norsk Global, described a turning point for the business, driven by ageing hardware and a legacy VMware estate that had become brittle and costly. "We were running on kit that was more than ten years old," he said in the session. "Licensing was becoming a problem, and we knew the risk we were carrying."

A proposed refresh from incumbent vendors was prohibitively expensive. "The figures we were given to upgrade didn't make sense for a business of our size," explained Andrews. It was only after a referral from IT services partner ET Works that Norsk explored Nutanix, leading to a proof-of-concept (PoC) that produced immediate, measurable advantages. 

The PoC featured Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV), a type-1 hypervisor developed by Nutanix for its hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) platform. "The PoC showed we could save between £150,000 and £170,000 just by moving to Nutanix AHV. That made the decision very straightforward," Andrews added. 

Even then, internal buy-in was mixed—until a serious outage struck. "That outage changed the conversation at board level," he noted. "Suddenly, the risk was real, and Nutanix became the obvious strategic choice. We needed stability and a platform we could grow on."

Avoiding costly hyperscale services

With Nutanix now in place, Norsk has been able to modernise without over-extending into costly hyperscale services. "We've gone hybrid," said Andrews. "Critical workloads stay on-prem for performance and cost control, but we use [Microsoft] Azure for backup and DR [disaster recovery] of key VMs [virtual machines]. It gives us the resilience we need without paying cloud premiums for everything."

Security and operational resilience were also overhauled. Norsk refreshed its endpoint detection and response (EDR) and extended detection and response (XDR) protection—"moving to proper EDR/XDR tooling,” according to Andrews—and implemented immutable backups with HYCU (Hybrid Backup Cloud, formerly Haiku). "Ransomware is one of our biggest risks," he said. "With immutable backups, at least we know we can recover."

The improvements go beyond infrastructure. Norsk is piloting AI use cases that could directly benefit retail clients, including predictive shipment failure detection, exception-flagging, and proactive customer notifications. But the CTO was balanced about the pace of AI investment: “We're not adopting AI for the sake of it. We'll use it where it clearly adds value."

Post-Brexit regulatory shifts and changing global trade dynamics have also required Norsk to rapidly adapt. It opened a Netherlands base to maintain seamless EU flows for retail clients and introduced a prepaid duty-and-tax model to minimise returns and reshipments for US-bound goods. "The infrastructure has to flex with the business," he said. "Nutanix has made that much simpler."

He closed with an acknowledgement of the support experience: "What's impressed us is how responsive Nutanix has been. It feels like we've simplified the whole operation."

AI economics and freedom from lock-in

Luke Congdon, Vice President of Product Management at Nutanix, reinforced many of the themes raised by Norsk—particularly around predictable pricing, operational simplicity and AI readiness.

Congdon leads Nutanix's hypervisor and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) portfolio, as well as its enterprise AI product lines. He emphasised that the company's hypervisor is included as standard: "Our hypervisor is always part of the subscription. You don't pay extra for it," he told Retail Technology magazine. "That's a big differentiator. Customers get enterprise-grade virtualisation without a separate licensing burden."

On virtual desktops, Congdon highlighted investments in efficiency and automation. "We've made a big push to make VDI easier to deploy and scale," he said. "Reusable guest customisation profiles, HV templates—these things save teams hours."

He also addressed market uncertainty following Broadcom's VMware acquisition: "Our partnership with Omniscale means customers running Horizon have a cost-effective way forward," he added, also noting Nutanix's "long-standing, very strong relationship" with Broadcom VDI rival, Citrix.

Much of the conversation focused on Nutanix's enterprise AI platform. Congdon described its purpose succinctly: “We're focused on inference—making it easy to deploy and run AI models with enterprise support, without exposing customers to unnecessary complexity."

Keeping IT simple and predictable

Nutanix's simplicity is intentional. "Traditional IT teams are being asked to support AI workloads," he said. "We build a control plane around inference so they can deploy models quickly, securely and reliably, without needing a PhD in machine learning."

Predictable costs were another pillar: "Public cloud pricing for AI is hard to forecast," Congdon acknowledged. "We're giving customers transparency. With a subscription model, they know exactly what they'll pay, which is very different from pay-per-use in the cloud."

When asked about challenges sizing AI workloads, he was candid: "Right now, sizing is the wild west. We're providing tools to help customers understand the infrastructure they'll need—and what it will cost."

Congdon also addressed Nutanix's expanding partner independent software vendor (ISV) ecosystem: "ISVs are essential. They bring the use cases, and we provide the platform. Collaboration is how we make AI truly enterprise-ready."

A clear trend: retailers want control

For retailers attending .NEXT London, the messages resonated. Norsk's story underscored how critical infrastructure reliability is to customer experience—whether in logistics, store operations or ecommerce. Nutanix's focus on predictable economics, hybrid deployment freedom, and AI operations aligns closely with what retailers say they need: control, cost clarity, and the ability to run workloads where they make the most sense.

As AI experimentation accelerates across the sector, from supply-chain forecasting to agentic store assistants, retailers are realising that these innovations can only scale on infrastructure built for flexibility and resilience. Nutanix .NEXT London argued that the foundations are not just a technical concern; they are now a strategic differentiator.