AI innovation is moving fast and increasing IT complexity. Jonathan Gorlin, senior director of product management at Cisco, sees three major trends shaping the IT landscape:
Cloud native and AI applications are piling up on top of legacy workloads.
Customers are demanding full-stack turnkey solutions, rather than components they must assemble themselves.
Data is proliferating at the network edge.
But supply chain challenges are complicating each of these trends. High demand has created a shortage and driven up prices for memory and other components. Availability and instability could stretch for another year or more.
“This is not unfamiliar territory,” Gorlin told The Forecast at the 2026 Nutanix .NEXT event in Chicago.
“IT always has to deal with unknowns and challenges, and that’s what makes it such an exciting space to be in. But this supply chain uncertainty is certainly greater than we’ve seen before, and things are changing day by day. I get asked constantly when this is going to end. I wish I had the magic crystal ball, but we will get through it.”
A shortage of infrastructure and components has plagued business buyers off-and-on since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when companies raced to buy up computing devices, mobile hotspots, and other infrastructure to support remote work. Today, supply chain instability is being driven largely by hyperscalers and AI companies purchasing datacenter infrastructure faster than vendors can produce it. Earlier this year, the New York Times warned that shortages caused by AI firms buying up memory chips could even lead to price hikes for consumer devices like smartphones.
This leaves companies, especially those with aging datacenter infrastructure, in a precarious position, forced to stretch out the life of their current equipment as they wait for new hardware to become available. To help customers bridge this gap, Gorlin said, Cisco is working with partners like Nutanix to both improve performance and expand the capabilities of existing solutions.
“While we get through this period of instability,” Gorlin said, “what’s important is that we help our customers maximize the existing infrastructure that they already have in place.”
Break the Chain of Inflexibility
The key to navigating supply chain challenges, Gorlin said, is finding ways to make existing hardware more flexible and adaptable. Starting around three years ago, he said, Cisco challenged its engineers to “break the chain” of inflexibility, opening up hardware to run virtualization software from a variety of vendors. In effect, this turns hardware into a reusable asset, reducing the need for rip-and-replace upgrades.
“What our customers really love about the joint Nutanix-Cisco solution is that you can take existing servers that are running on a different environment today, and you can bring those into a Nutanix environment,” he said. “That’s really critical, and we’re not yet seeing that from other compute vendors.
Cisco has even certified older equipment, such as Cisco UCS B200 Blade Servers, to run a modern software stack reliably and securely, with full vendor support. Also, Cisco is working with Nutanix and storage partners to connect external storage to existing hardware, helping to extend the life of compute environments even as additional memory and NAND flash storage are difficult to procure.
“We wanted to unlock customers’ hardware,” Gorlin said.
“We asked: ‘How can we use what’s on your floor now? How can we bring it into the operational model that Nutanix offers?’ We’re just continuing to qualify more hardware, helping our customers to reuse as much as they possibly can.”
Gorlin predicted that these developments will continue to have an impact on datacenters, even after current supply chain pressures are alleviated.
“Customers are not going to want to go back to an inflexible model,” he said.
Flexible for the Future
Gorlin cited a mining customer in South America as an example of what is possible with this new flexibility. The customer has very specific requirements for both its IT and OT environments, but the company was running largely fragmented, legacy infrastructure. Company leaders wanted to simplify their environment while standardizing on a future-proof solution.
Gorlin described how Cisco and Nutanix delivered a unified architecture built on Cisco’s UCS X-Series Modular System.
“They were able to unify their IT and OT environments through a single vendor and a single architecture,” he said.
“Those environments do have different requirements, but they can seamlessly move from one software stack to another stack with the same hardware investment. And over time, as requirements change, we can now move more of it to Nutanix. We can be very flexible with the environment.”
In addition to unifying the company’s IT and OT environments, Gorlin said, the solution reduced server footprint by more than 50%, with corresponding reductions in power and cooling needs. It also positioned the company to bring in AI workloads when needed, as GPUs can easily be added to the modular architecture.
“The feedback from the customer was that not only did performance improve, but the number of support desk tickets that they receive has also been drastically reduced,” Gorlin said.
“What more could you want in an environment than to simplify it, make the day-to-day management easier, and create a better user experience?”
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Calvin Hennick is a contributing writer. His work appears in BizTech, Engineering Inc., The Boston Globe Magazine and elsewhere. He is also the author of Once More to the Rodeo: A Memoir. Find him on LinkedIn.
Ken Kaplan contributed to this story. He is Editor in Chief for The Forecast by Nutanix. Find him on X @kenekaplan and LinkedIn.
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