Almost three months ago, possibly more or less depending on where you live, work, and go to school, the world shut down. Now that some businesses, schools, and governments are reopening, infrastructure vendors (along with the rest of us) are trying to predict what the new normal will look like in terms of IT environments and everyday life.

Some, like Dell Technologies, say we are already there. On the company’s earnings call last week, Dell COO Jeff Clarke detailed a three-phase COVID-19 recovery process. The first phase, dubbed “rapid response,” was “largely behind us,” he said. This means we are now in phase two, “the new normal,” which he described as society realizing that “work isn’t a destination, rather it’s something many of us can do from anywhere, anytime.” (For the record, phase three, aka the future, is “new opportunities tied to high volumes of virtual and online businesses.)

Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey also discussed the new normal on his company’s earnings call. “We do not see the shift as temporary,” he said. “And in fact, we see the future world changing permanently.”

Nutanix has gone “completely virtual,” with all of its events and meetings, Pandey added. “And I’ve seen comparable yield in terms of qualified leads and virtual meeting for our sales organization at less than half the cost.”

Dell and Nutanix aren’t alone in thinking that this shift to digital work and virtual meetings is the new normal. In fact Gartner forecasts that by 2024, in-person enterprise meeting will drop from 60% to 25%, driven by remote work and changing workforce demographics. And Forrester says even after scientists develop a COVID-19 vaccine, companies won’t return to a pre-pandemic normal because knowledge workers will demand a more flexible schedule and better employee experience.

During an interview with SDxCentral after Nutanix’s earnings call, Pandey said the future of work will be a lot more digital, and he expects the new normal to look very blurry.

This isn’t the first time Pandey’s talked about a blurry future, but it’s usually more in the context of blurring the lines between virtual machines (VMs) and containers, or public and private clouds. And, in fact, during this most recent interview, he also discussed how Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) will “blur the lines between private and public clouds.”

But, this blurry future-of-work-life-balance represents an even bigger change than blurred IT environments. “This is bigger than anything I’ve ever seen,” Pandey said. “It’s bigger than the internet because the internet took decades, even mobile computing took a whole decade to become pervasive. All of this has happened in a matter of two months.”

Pandey calls this post-pandemic new normal future the “data trifecta” because it encompasses work, education, and health care. “And each of them is multiple billion customers, professional workers, customers-slash-patients that have a doctor or health care relationship, and a couple billion school children out there.”

All three went remote in a matter of weeks. And once it became clear that networks could scale to handle the massive traffic influx from teleworkers, students, and patients, some aspects of this new virtual life became more appealing than the old, pre-pandemic normal — things like not having to commute to an office every day, and talking to your doctor from the comfort of home instead of an medical clinic. Plus, the new no-travel policies save companies and commuters’ money, and telemedicine typically costs patients’ less out of pocket.

Some colleges have already decided that their students won’t return to campus and instead continue distance learning in the fall, which calls into question paying hefty tuition costs for an on-line education.

“I just heard this today in a CNN program about how education has become 1,400% more expensive over the last 40 years,” Pandey said. “And there hasn’t been a whole of innovation in terms of how education is delivered.”

Pandey also cited New York University professor Scott Galloway, who forecast that tier-two colleges will collapse in the wake of the coronavirus “because they don’t have any differentiation. It’s going to level the playing field,” Pandey said. “There will be a huge disruption in education. And I think telemedicine will take off in a big way.”

But it’s not just these two sectors that will experience a sea change. “I think the future work will be a lot more digital, and a lot more hybrid,” Pandey said.

While he doesn’t expect facilities to completely disappear, Pandey said work schedules will remain more flexible, and employees will collaborate remotely with team members who live in different states and countries. “I think the future work is more hyperconverged where work and life will blur into each other — like how days are blurring into evenings now. I think it’s going to be a very blurry work-life ecosystem in the coming, not just months, but the future.”