Enterprise IT has always run on the premise of "this and this and this." That list is longer than it has ever been. There’s mounting pressure from having to manage more AI-native applications, an unpredictable hardware supply chain and a security landscape that grows more complex as autonomous AI agents move from concept to deployment. Rather than reach for a completely new IT architecture, Cisco’s Jonathan Gorlin says there are innovative ways to build on what's already in use.
"It's a complex time to be in IT and technology," Gorlin, a senior Cisco executive overseeing the company's Nutanix partnership, told The Forecast in April at the 2026 .NEXT event in Chicago.
"How do we get IT to grapple with all of these newer applications that are coming while still having to maintain all of the older, more traditional applications? It's not an either-or, it's an and, always with IT."
He outlined the convergence of pressures reshaping data center strategy: the proliferation of cloud-native and AI applications landing on top of existing traditional workloads, a hardware supply chain that continues to shift day by day, and an enterprise edge generating data faster than most organizations can capture and convert it into value.
That "and" problem of running legacy environments while racing toward AI-ready infrastructure is what a Cisco-Nutanix partnership is addressing. Golin explained that three years ago, the two companies challenged their engineering teams to build a solution with sufficient architectural flexibility to absorb future disruption.
Industry analysts pegged infrastructure rigidity as a primary inhibitor to enterprise AI adoption, with procurement cycles and hardware lock-in creating deployment delays that can stretch months. Those delays are now a strategic liability as AI moves from experimental to operational. Gorlin discussed how having the ability to extend the life of existing compute environments through external storage partnerships, including integrations with FlashStack, Everpure and NetApp, appeals to many IT decision makers. And re-qualifying older blade servers for Nutanix deployments allows IT teams to keep using hardware they’re already running.
"Customers are not going to want to go back to an inflexible model," Gorlin said. "So I think we're there. We've spent the time to invest there."
The networking layer is under pressure by bandwidth requirements now being driven by agentic AI. Gorlin said the shift from large language model chatbots to autonomous AI agent changes the fundamental traffic pattern inside the enterprise network.
"When you unleash all of these agents, and really we should be thinking of agents now as almost extensions of our workforce, we're going to see just an insatiable demand for bandwidth," Gorlin said. "The only way that they can get stuff done is by communicating with each other and communicating with our important data for being able to make decisions."
Security, Gorlin argued, is the dimension that the industry has not yet fully reckoned with.
Protecting agentic AI is a bidirectional challenge. Gorlin explained that guardrails must shield agents from external threats such as prompt injection and data leakage, but they must also protect the enterprise from decisions made autonomously by those same agents.
"How do we protect agents from the world? But also, how do we protect the world from agents?" Gorlin asked. "When decisions are being made in an autonomous way, where is the accountability? So we have to make sure we're very thoughtful about how we do this in a very secure way."
An open-ecosystem approach is what Gorlin said makes all of this converge so that different parts, existing and new, work together. Standardize on a compute platform, then retrofit it into any solution stack. For example, the joint Cisco-Nutanix tooling, integrating Nutanix management with Cisco Intersight, delivers pre-configured networking, compute, hypervisor and storage out of the box. No assembly required.
The question of when the supply chain fully stabilizes, Gorlin acknowledged, doesn't have a clean answer. But the architecture being built to survive the disruption, he suggested, is more valuable than the disruption itself.
"This will pass and we'll get back to normal," he said. "But customers are not going to want to go back to an inflexible model."
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Video transcript:
Jason Lopez: AI demand, security, and legacy infrastructure are a few of the challenges in enterprise computing. Instead of rebuilding from scratch, IT looks to networking to make systems work.
Jonathan Gorlin: It's a complex time to be in IT and technology, and I'll say there are probably three trends that we're looking at right now, plus I'll give you a bonus trend. So first of all, what we're seeing is, of course, with the proliferation of new types of applications, cloud native, AI, of course, is top of mind. So how do we get IT to grapple with all of these newer applications that are coming while still having to maintain all of the older, more traditional applications, right? It's not an either or, it's an and, always with IT. It's this and this and this. How do we manage all of that? So that's one big trend. The second trend that I'll say is just how do we simplify? And our customers are telling us they no longer want the pieces and parts to build an architecture. They really want a full-stack, validated turnkey solution that they can deploy at scale. And so really simplifying everything in terms of how you manage this environment is really top of mind for customers. And then third is really what we see about with edge and this proliferation of data at the edge. How do we capture that? How do we turn that into value? So we have some exciting announcements between the two companies related to that as well. And then my bonus one is something that I think we're all dealing with right now, which is just supply chain. And how do we get a hold of hardware? And how do we deal with just this incredible churn in the system of how do we get equipment? How do we continue to grow our environments? And so we're really trying to address all of these problems with our joint partnership.
Ken Kaplan: Do you see the supply chain issue as just another challenge on top of many other challenges? Or is it something you've seen happen in the past? Put your perspective.
Jonathan Gorlin: Yeah, I would say this is not an unfamiliar territory. IT always has to deal with unknowns and challenges. And that's what makes it such an exciting space to be in. But this is certainly maybe to a greater extent than what we've seen before. And of course, it's changing day by day. I get asked constantly, you know, Jonathan, what do you think? When is it going to end? And I wish I had the magic crystal ball. But we will get through it on the other side. And I think what's important also is we're helping customers maximize the existing infrastructure that they have. And we can get into that a little bit later to really help hold us over while we get through this period of just a little bit of instability, I would say, in hardware availability.
Ken Kaplan: Customers want a full solution, which could include a variety of different technologies. And you're helping them find that right connection. What are they looking for now to get through this period? Are there some things that they're asking you specifically?
Jonathan Gorlin: Yeah, absolutely. I would say really it comes down to how can I continue to run my environments and do our job and answer to all of our stakeholders in the event where it would take me longer to procure new hardware. And so we're doing some specific things within the partnership. Actually, the timing is perfect. We're here at .NEXT. Nutanix and Cisco have been leaning in heavily into external storage partnerships as well. So the timing couldn't be more perfect. And what that means is even in a time where it's harder to get memory and NAND flash, we can actually leverage those existing investments from some of our storage partners. We can bring that in and extend the life of existing compute environments. And we've gone so far as to even go back and qualify some of the UCS B200 blades that we used to have. And we have a huge install base of those. So we wanted to unlock for customers and say, how can we use what's on your floor now? How can we bring it into the easy operational model that Nutanix offers for lifecycle management? And so we've actually delivered on that. And at the show, there are going to be some new announcements about more storage partnerships. So we're just continuing to lean and qualify more hardware, being able to reuse as much as you possibly can.
Ken Kaplan: So we're thinking storage, we're thinking compute. What's the role of networking in that?
Jonathan Gorlin: Yeah, certainly networking is fundamental when you're talking about storage, right? Storage has to traverse the network. So I'd say there's really maybe two areas that I would look at here. One is when you've got distributed scale-out storage, you have to have a high-performing network. And that's something that we do really well with the integration between our two companies. If you remember, I mentioned one of the challenges is customers don't want to build it themselves. They want a turnkey solution. And with the Nutanix tooling integrated with Cisco Intersight, which is how we manage our compute, we actually integrated the two management tools together. What that allows us to do is out of the box, we pre-configure not just the compute and the hypervisor and the storage, but also the networking, the east-west high-speed fabric. And that's really what UCS brought to the game 15 years ago, like what made Cisco Compute and UCS unique. It was about integrating the network into that. And so we've got a best practices, out-of-box configuration for the network, which is what we need to ensure high performance. And then at the same time, the requirements, I talked about those applications coming in, now AI is just demanding more and more. There's an insatiable demand for bandwidth and compute and GPU resources. And so I think the need is going to continue to grow, but we're here and we're ready for it.
Ken Kaplan: At some point, everyone's going to do this, but right now people are kind of trapped. Just describe what the challenge is that these kinds of partnerships are overcoming.
Jonathan Gorlin: Yeah, I think traditionally there was kind of a way that Nutanix and other server vendors would kind of come together and qualify. It was typically more of like you take Nutanix software and you qualify it on a server platform and like off we go, we're off to the races. And that worked well when we had abundance of hardware and we didn't necessarily need quite as much flexibility. But three years ago when we formed this strategic partnership between Cisco and Nutanix, we were very thoughtful about challenging the engineering teams to how do we get away and break the chain of having this inflexibility. And the engineering teams, boy did they deliver, right? And so we thought about this and now it's paying dividends for customers so we can go back to existing customers, we can help them navigate the situation that we're in. And we're not going to be in this situation forever, right? This will pass and we'll get back to normal but customers are not going to want to go back to an inflexible model. So I think we're there. We've spent the time to invest there and that's the compute side and then on the storage side, the Nutanix teams have done a phenomenal job of working with some of the biggest storage partners out there. And at the show here we're talking about Everpeer as well as NetApp. So these are going to be huge for our customers because those are synonymous. We have a CI converged infrastructure business with both of those partners and it's huge with Cisco UCS. And so we're really excited. NetApp is the newest member of the family that we're going to be talking about through the rest of this year. But also FlashStack and Everpeer is shipping and available now. We have a number of very excited customers using that.
Ken Kaplan: You want your networking security capabilities to be able to plug into somebody else's technology. So security, being able to plug into that and controls from another partner, is it more intense these days than ever?
Jonathan Gorlin: It is. And we're definitely, just like Nutanix has done for the last several years now, we're really embracing an open ecosystem. It's really important. I think gone are the days where you've got proprietary stacks and you decide you do it your way and you don't interoperate. I think those days are behind us now. That's another trend that we're seeing. And so we've embraced this for many years now with our UCS platform. We call it a platform because really, we want to support the best of breed solutions in the data center, right? We've got a phenomenal hardware platform and a management layer of insight of how we manage this, as well as the fabric that interconnects it. But we need to support the best of breed, including the Nutanix stack, both for traditional VMs and HV, as well as the Nutanix Kubernetes platform for newer applications. But we also need to support our other partners, right? Microsoft, Red Hat, Broadcom and VMware. We have to support everybody. And it actually works out as a net positive for customers. Because the way we support our hardware platform is we actually take a agnostic approach. We don't build specific hardware appliances. Instead, what we do is you standardize on a compute platform, and then we allow you to retrofit into any solution. So this allows customers, and this is what our customers really love about the joint Nutanix-Cisco solution, you can take existing servers that you have that maybe are running VMware today, or maybe running Windows Server today, and you can bring those into a Nutanix environment with no compromises. So that's really critical, and we're not yet seeing that from other compute vendors. And so that's really part of the secret sauce between the two companies.
Ken Kaplan: How has the view from a networking perspective changed with cloud native, with the demand for AI, AI factory type infrastructure? How has that changed your world?
Jonathan Gorlin: Yeah, well, I definitely say that networking is just a key, when you talk about these distributed systems, whether we're doing training or inferencing, how quickly you can access the data is everything. How do you make sure that GPU utilization is the maximum it can be? These are not inexpensive parts and components that IT is investing in. How do we make sure we keep those components at peak efficiency, number one, but also just in terms of how AI has evolved, we're moving from LLM chatbots to now agentic AI, that's actually changing things quite a bit in terms of the pattern in the network. So it used to be kind of a request response kind of traditional model that we've had for quite some time, but now when you unleash all of these agents, and really we should be thinking of agents now as almost extensions of our workforce, right? Now we're going to see just an insatiable demand for bandwidth and we have to continue, all these agents are going to be working on our behalf and the only way that they can get stuff done is by communicating with each other and communicating with our important data for being able to make decisions. So I'd say the network is definitely crucial and the connective tissue to make all of this work, but also we shouldn't forget about security, and security has to be paramount in this new world that we're in. So doing network and then baking the security into the fabric of the network is really crucial and that's really what we're thinking about at Cisco. With these agents now, we have to protect agents from the world, can imagine from prompt injections and leaking confidential information, we have to be careful about that, but we also have to think the other direction. How do we protect agents? How do we protect the world from agents? The other way around, right? And so you can imagine now when decisions are being made in an autonomous way, where is the accountability? So we have to make sure we're very thoughtful about how we do this in a very secure way, we put the right guardrails in place and the right way to detect when there are situations like this. So these are areas that Cisco is really spending a lot of time thinking through.
Jason Lopez 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.
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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