Anthony Jackman kept hearing the same story last year. Backup deals stalled. So did disaster recovery and storage. Nothing was canceled. It just wasn't moving, and the freeze signaled a fresh opening for service providers.
Jackman, chief innovation officer at Expedient, a cloud service provider (CSP) that operates VMware and Nutanix stacks across 15 data centers, attributes last year's freeze to a perfect storm of pressures: Broadcom's VMware overhaul, AI's rapid ascent in the enterprise along with related hardware shortages and price increases, and companies repatriating cloud workloads to on-premises systems.
In this Tech Barometer podcast, he sees clients no longer wanting to solve those problems one at a time. They want a trusted advisor to help them handle the complexity. Compounding pressures are reshaping what service providers sell and how they sell it.
"The clients just pumped the brakes on everything," he told The Forecast. “This year, everything seems to have picked back up, even in the face of the rapidly increasing costs.”
When Jackman joined Expedient, he was an architect in a shop that was all VMware. That gave him an up-close vantage point to witness the many changes since the Broadcom purchase. He said clients have had time to assess how they'll address perceived increases in VMware pricing and the end of general support for vSphere 8, which is reportedly set for October 2027. Jackman said that some IT teams that relied on service providers that are no longer part of the VMware partner program have switched providers, with some moving to a different software platform.
This is just one facet of the compounding storm IT teams and service providers are navigating. The past few years have been full of unknowns and uncertainty. But Jackman sees progress.
“It has been a very great year for us so far, but it's also a very challenging time because a lot of change is happening,” Jackman said.
Where's the Opportunity for Service Providers?
Cloud service providers deliver compute, storage, backup, disaster recovery, networking and security as managed services, often bundling the infrastructure with the teams that operate it so customers can offload complexity rather than assembling the pieces themselves. The pileup of VMware, AI, hardware and cloud pressures has created an opening for providers who can combine infrastructure with the experts who know how to run it.
"It's really not enough to just be an infrastructure home," Jackman said. "You need to be a full-service provider, offering the compute, backups, disaster recovery, networking, security services and the human team that goes along with it."
Jackman has seen clients work through solid state drive (SSD) price increases, which have risen as much as 200% over the last year, and memory prices that have surged nearly 500%. And most have figured out how they'll balance data and workloads between public and private clouds. But with the novelty and urgency surrounding AI adoption, IT teams are under pressure to adopt and adapt quickly and wisely.
Jackman advocates taking a solutions-based approach through "new operating models" rather than tackling one-off "science projects."
CSPs can guide customers through pricing shifts, migrations and mixed-stack strategies to find the right combination of capabilities, explained Jackman.
“Fortunately for us, we have a very strong partnership with Nutanix,” he said. “We're very good at it. We support the entire stack and we do it at a large scale. And we've been doing it for years. So the confidence level is there for those clients.”
What's the Role of Service Providers in Enterprise AI?
CSPs can help organizations address the operational, governance, security and cost considerations that arise as AI moves from experimentation into production. Companies are moving quickly from experimentation to broad deployment, with 59% of IT executives expecting their organizations to be running more than five AI-enabled applications by 2029, according to Nutanix's 8th Annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey.
Expedient says it has assembled an AI product line that is the company's fastest-selling offering, describing that it addresses the security, governance, and cost-control challenges that come with moving AI from experimentation into production.
Shadow AI is another issue that service providers can take on, Jackman said. Nearly 80% of IT executives in the ECI survey say they've encountered AI applications or agents implemented by employees in non-IT functions, and 87% say AI tools and agents operating outside official oversight create business risk.
“We set AI permissions, access rules, and usage guidance before our customers’ employees start building and using agents freely,” Jackman said.
How Do Service Providers Choose What Infrastructure is Right for Their Customers?
As enterprises move workloads back on premises, providers can help clients place each application where it runs best.
Cloud repatriation, which involves moving workloads from public or hyperscale clouds to on-premises or privately hosted clouds, is another opportunity for service providers.
A 2025 Foundry study, commissioned by OpenText, found that 67% of enterprises had already moved some workloads from public cloud to on-premises, private cloud or hybrid environments, while 87% planned to repatriate workloads within the next 12 to 24 months. Reasons include a desire for better data security and privacy (51%), greater cost efficiency (39%) and better data recovery and business continuity options (34%).
For Jackman, ‘owning your intelligence’ means retaining greater control over where workloads and data are operated
Jackman said service providers can turn those concerns into workload-by-workload decisions for clients. Expedient works with customers to determine which applications belong in hyperscale clouds, which make more sense in private or managed environments, and which should remain inside the customer's own facilities. It can then operate the infrastructure wherever those workloads are deployed.
"We encourage our clients to put every workload in the best place for that workload," he said.
How Do Service Providers Prepare for What's Next?
Jackman said service providers can do as much of the hard work as possible before customers need new capabilities. For Expedient, that means building on standard infrastructure.
Jackman explained that Expedient began standardizing networks across its 15 data centers years ago and then made its server infrastructure more flexible so capacity could shift as demand changed. Standardization lets Expedient absorb sudden swings in storage and memory pricing rather than passing them straight through to customers.
He said it’s important to remain informed but resist chasing every new technology.
"CIOs aren't interested in expensive science projects that don't produce business value," he said. "Service providers have to make sure they're solving a real business problem."
Podcast transcript:
Anthony Jackman: 2025 was viewed as like the year of the frozen deal that just never happened. The customer didn't decide I'm not doing this, they just were waiting. I think what that gave everybody was a year to really think through what they wanted and to strategize. This year everything seems to have picked back up even in the face of the rapidly increasing costs. I do see customers finally making a change and I think that that's going to continue.
Jason Lopez: Anthony Jackman is the Chief Innovation Officer of Expedient, an IT provider running 15 data centers in the U.S. This is the Tech Barometer Podcast. I'm Jason Lopez.
Anthony Jackman: It has been a very great year for us so far, but it's also a very challenging time because a lot of change is happening.
Jason Lopez: For years, the question of how a ran its data center had one default answer, VMware. It integrated with everything and IT departments built their entire operating model around it. Jackman has watched that certainty unravel from the inside.
Anthony Jackman: The thing that was consistent is that we never had problems.
Jason Lopez: He's talking about Nutanix, which he first brought into Expedient a decade ago, not as a replacement for VMware, but as a storage layer underneath it. The reliability record built over those years would matter later.
Anthony Jackman: We just never had that with Nutanix. That's what gave us the confidence to move forward with AHV as a hypervisor and we did that a number of years ago and now it's growing very fast. We do a lot of AHV private cloud at this point.
Jason Lopez: That growth has accelerated, not because Expedient went looking for it, but because the VMware world changed and clients came looking for them.
Anthony Jackman: I don't know what I would compare it to because it was a lot of things at once. It was first and foremost a business challenge, but it was a business challenge that brought technical challenges along with it.
Jason Lopez: Jackman says the clients who came to Expedient weren't necessarily angry at VMware's technology. The technology, he says, is still good. What changed was how it gets sold and what customers are now required to buy.
Anthony Jackman: A lot of people saw what were perceived to be very large price increases. In reality, it wasn't necessarily a price increase for a given thing. It was that we don't sell that thing anymore. We sell this big package and at least within our client base, the bulk of them don't use most of those features. Now, when they come run on our cloud, they do because we've baked all those things in to just work well.
Jason Lopez: That distinction between buying a package and consuming a service is central to how Expedient positions itself. It's an ROI proposition.
Anthony Jackman: We're a full service provider, so everything we do is very integrated. It's the compute, backups, disaster recovery, networking, and security services, and then the human team that goes along with it so that our customers are buying an outcome and not buying a science project.
Jason Lopez: For clients who wanted to stay with VMware but needed a different operating model, Expedient offers that. For clients who wanted something else entirely, Expedient offers that too through its partnership with Nutanix.
Anthony Jackman: They're the ones that come knocking on our door saying, I like the cloud operating model. However, I don't want to stay with VMware. I want something else. Fortunately for us, we have a very strong partnership with Nutanix. We're very good at it. We support the entire stack and we do it at large scale. We've been doing it for years. The confidence level is there for those clients.
Jason Lopez: But the decision between platforms is never simple. For most clients, Jackman says, what they're really evaluating is how much change they can absorb and what capabilities they can't live without.
Anthony Jackman: The truth is most of these clients have to learn something new regardless because some solutions just aren't even possible anymore. For the ones that want to look at something else, we can offer them the integrated Nutanix platform, which is very easy to use. And they get the advantage of a lot of the newer capabilities with a relatively small uplift in how much they have to learn. And obviously, we're there to help them. We are a full service provider. So the ones that really don't want to learn much new, they can just rely on us. But I think most customers like to have a little bit of control over what's happening in their environment.
Jason Lopez: That shift away from open integrations and closed ecosystems is pushing clients to reconsider the whole stack, and AI is pressing on that reconsideration even harder.
Anthony Jackman: I think one that's kind of high up on the list is network security, which historically was difficult to do, required a lot of products, required a lot of thought. And that's something that they could take advantage of in the Nutanix platform because it's very integrated to do micro-segmentation and to get visualization and observability into what's happening in your network. And security is just becoming more and more important. Every year, security becomes more important than it was before. And AI is definitely pressing on that even harder.
Jason Lopez: Meanwhile, Expedient itself has been rebuilding its own infrastructure for what's coming. 15 data centers standardized to look identical from a network perspective and a shift in how Nutanix fits into the picture.
Anthony Jackman: It's funny, we started with Nutanix as a storage platform. Now what we're primarily driving is Nutanix as a compute platform using external storage. And it's not because we don't like the Nutanix storage, it's great. But as a provider at our scale, hyper-converged storage can come with some challenges because we don't operate 10 or 20 hosts, we operate thousands of hosts. So now we have a unified storage layer and I can buy one type of host and I can use it for VMware or Nutanix and we're not moving things around racks.
Jason Lopez: And then there's the edge. Manufacturing plants, remote facilities, anywhere that IT going down for five minutes could shut down a plant for a day.
Anthony Jackman: We have manufacturing clients that if IT goes down for five minutes, the plant could be down for a day or multiple days and cost them millions of dollars. So it's very mission critical and it has to live in their four walls. So we basically package up an expedient private cloud in a small, resilient, rugged box, drop it in their data center. And to us, it looks like it's in our four walls. So we manage it the same way we manage everything else. It just happens to be living somewhere else.
Jason Lopez: The year of uncertainty that froze so many decisions in 2025 has given way to something different. Jackman says clients who spent that year thinking are now moving.
Anthony Jackman: The customer didn't decide I'm not doing this. They just were waiting. I think what that gave everybody was a year to really think through what they wanted and to strategize. And then this year, everything seems to have picked back up, even in the face of the rapidly increasing costs, specifically hardware. I do see customers finally making a change, and I think that that's going to continue.
Jason Lopez: Anthony Jackman is the chief innovation officer at Expedient. This is the Tech Barometer podcast, a production of The Forecast by Nutanix. I'm Jason Lopez. For more stories on technology and the people in tech, visit theforecastbynutanix.com.
Related:
Editor’s note: Like more topics covered by The Forecast, this story continues to evolve. On September 16, The Register reported “VMware swings its focus back to low-end server virt, promises vSphere Standard upgrade – Found the time to focus and ‘corrected’ incentives that saw sales drive users to full private clouds. On September 28, CRN reported "Top VMware Partner Insight Deauthorized By Broadcom In North America."
David Rand is a business and technology reporter whose work has appeared in major publications around the world. He specializes in spotting and digging into what’s coming next–and helping executives in organizations of all sizes know what to do about it.
Jason Lopez produced the podcast. He is executive producer of Tech Barometer, the podcast outlet for The Forecast. He’s the founder of Connected Social Media. Previously, he was executive producer at PodTech and a reporter at NPR.
© 2026 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, Inc. is not affiliated with VMware by Broadcom or Broadcom. For additional information and important legal disclaimers, please go here.
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