HCL Technologies (HCL), a leading global technology company, and Google Cloud today announced the expansion of their strategic partnership to bring HCL Software’s Digital Experience (DX) and Unica Marketing cloud-native platforms to Google Cloud. The announcement follows the success of the initial Google and HCL Software Commerce partnership announced in June 2020.

The Google Cloud offering provides customers a cost effective and highly scalable, secure and elastic cloud deployment option with global coverage that can support deployment of HCL’s DX, Unica and Commerce cloud-native platforms. DX’s cloud-native capabilities allow customers to deploy world-class, business-critical solutions significantly faster than before. Organizations with the most complex customer marketing data depend on HCL’s integrated cloud-native Unica marketing platform to support their precision marketing at scale. The HCL Commerce cloud-native platform delivers innovative and engaging customer experiences that go beyond the transaction.

“The collaboration between HCL Software and Google Cloud will deliver significant value for customers who want to deploy DX, Unica and Commerce from Google Cloud,” said Darren Oberst, Corporate Vice President and Head of HCL Software. “With the support of our global implementation business partners, we can quickly deliver comprehensive experiences to any audience, putting our clients in the best position to deploy and scale with Google’s Cloud and HCL’s cloud-native solutions.”

HCL DX is used by a wide range of organizations, including financial services firms, healthcare providers and government agencies, to provide a secure and personalized business-critical digital experience that is built cloud-native at scale across their multiple channels both internally and externally. Users of HCL DX on Google Cloud can take advantage of the all-new Digital Asset Manager (DAM) and developer toolkits to drastically improve productivity. When integrated with Google’s Data Cloud and proven artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, DX solutions provide actionable insights to help organizations deliver more relevant customer experiences.

HCL Unica is used by many of the world’s most recognized financial services firms, healthcare providers, retail, telecom, and government agencies to provide secure and personalized business-critical multi-channel experiences. Point-and-click integrations from Unica Link and over 780 APIs simplify even the most challenging integrations, driving business results quickly when run on Google Cloud. The Unica product roadmap includes integration to many of Google’s market-leading tools.

“Businesses across industries, from healthcare to banking to retail, work with HCL DX and Unica to create stronger online experiences for their customers, employees, and partners,” said Avanish Sahai, Vice President, ISV and Application Partners at Google Cloud. “By bringing DX and Unica to Google Cloud, HCL Software can enrich these solutions with capabilities in AI, ML and analytics, and extend DX and Unica globally on our network. We’re excited to further expand our strategic partnership with HCL and look forward to supporting DX and Unica customers.”

This latest announcement from HCL and Google Cloud expands on a deep partnership between the two companies to help organizations digitally transform. There are now three HCL customer experience products employing Google Cloud as a preferred cloud platform. HCL Commerce has seen solid success through this collaboration since its partnership with Google Cloud was announced in June 2020. Since then, several HCL Commerce customers from around the world have migrated to Google Cloud. With the addition of DX and Unica, HCL Software’s financial services, healthcare and government customers and agencies have the option to move to Google Cloud. In 2019, HCL and Google Cloud announced the launch of HCL’s Google Cloud Business Unit to accelerate enterprise cloud adoption worldwide. To support customers, HCL has established three dedicated Google Cloud Native Labs in New York, London and the New Delhi area. These labs provide business-focused design workshops to engage customers and develop IP and MVPs on Google Cloud across industries effectively and efficiently.

“The HCL Google Cloud Ecosystem enables product collaboration across HCL Software and Google Cloud,” said Sanjay Singh, SVP & Global Head, HCL Google Ecosystem, HCL Technologies. “With the launch of HCL Digital Experience and Unica on Google Cloud, we continue to build on our portfolio of joint offerings to accelerate our customers’ digital transformation and drive a superior customer experience,”

Nutanix Clusters Land on Amazon EC2 Bare-Metal

Nutanix announced in August 2020 that Nutanix Clusters are now available on bare-metal instances of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), marking the company’s first major step into public-cloud-hosted hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). The move allows enterprises already running Nutanix on-premises to extend those environments into AWS without rearchitecting their workloads.

What Is Nutanix Clusters on AWS?

Nutanix Clusters brings the company’s HCI software stack — which converges compute, storage, and networking management — to AWS EC2 bare-metal instances. Because these instances expose the underlying hardware directly rather than through a hypervisor layer, Nutanix can run its own hypervisor and storage fabric on top, replicating the on-premises experience inside AWS data centers.

Manoj Agarwal, then Senior Vice President of Engineering at Nutanix, described the value proposition clearly: AWS does not natively offer HCI capabilities based on the Nutanix virtual machine stack, so Nutanix Clusters fills a gap for organizations that want HCI-style infrastructure management in the public cloud.

Key Capabilities and Benefits

No Workload Refactoring Required

One of the primary selling points is that IT organizations can lift and shift existing on-premises Nutanix clusters to AWS without refactoring applications. Because the underlying platform is identical, VMs and workloads behave the same way in the cloud as they do on-premises.

Unified Management via Nutanix Prism

IT teams can provision and manage Nutanix Clusters on AWS using Nutanix Prism — the same management console used for on-premises deployments. This single management plane eliminates the need to learn cloud-native tooling or maintain separate operational workflows for cloud and on-premises environments.

Access to the Full Nutanix Add-On Ecosystem

Running Nutanix on AWS also unlocks the broader suite of Nutanix add-on services, including:

• Nutanix Files — unstructured data management and file services
• Nutanix Calm — application orchestration and automation
• Nutanix Era — database lifecycle management and provisioning

These services function consistently whether the underlying cluster is in an on-premises data center or on AWS, reinforcing the goal of a single operational model across environments.

The Hybrid Cloud Context: Why This Matters

The announcement arrived during a period of significant disruption. The economic pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated hybrid cloud adoption as IT teams looked for ways to reduce total cost of ownership and increase operational flexibility. Many organizations had historically managed cloud and on-premises environments as completely separate silos — each with its own tooling, processes, and operational teams.

Nutanix Clusters on AWS directly addresses this fragmentation. Rather than forcing IT teams to choose between a dedicated on-premises HCI platform and native cloud services, it allows them to span both using a common infrastructure and management layer.

Avoiding Cloud Lock-In

Agarwal also positioned Nutanix Clusters as a hedge against cloud vendor lock-in. By deploying a consistent HCI platform across on-premises and cloud environments — and potentially across multiple clouds — IT organizations can move workloads more freely without being tightly coupled to any single cloud provider’s proprietary services.

Notably, at the time of the announcement, Nutanix declined to confirm whether Clusters support would be extended to other public cloud platforms beyond AWS. The multi-cloud angle remained aspirational rather than immediately actionable for non-AWS environments.

How Nutanix Competes in the Hybrid Cloud Management Race

Nutanix is not the only vendor pursuing the role of a unified hybrid cloud management plane. Cloud providers themselves have moved in the opposite direction — making managed, on-premises versions of their cloud platforms available (for example, AWS Outposts, Google Anthos, and Azure Arc). These offerings let cloud vendors manage on-premises infrastructure on behalf of customers.

Nutanix’s approach differs in a meaningful way: IT teams retain direct control of their infrastructure and operational model. Rather than delegating management to a cloud provider, organizations use Nutanix tooling to automate hybrid cloud operations themselves. This resonates particularly with enterprises that have regulatory, data sovereignty, or operational reasons to maintain direct infrastructure control.

Summary

Nutanix Clusters on AWS represents a significant milestone for enterprise HCI in the public cloud. By running on EC2 bare-metal instances and integrating with the existing Nutanix Prism management layer, it gives IT teams a credible, low-disruption path to hybrid cloud — extending familiar on-premises infrastructure into AWS without sacrificing consistency, tooling, or control. Whether this approach becomes a dominant hybrid cloud model will depend on how quickly organizations can consolidate fragmented cloud and on-premises operations under a single management framework.