Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2025. Read them in this 17th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Rob Hirschfeld, RackN CEO & Co-Founder
For the IT industry, 2025 promises to be one of the most disruptive years in my long experience. In addition to the scramble to implement LLM and AI models, enterprises are desperately realigning their virtualization strategy away from VMware.
These two critical priorities have a high degree of uncertainty because there’s no clear “right way” defined yet, and that will make 2025 a bumpy year for IT. Unlike past innovation waves, these trends require more than just acquiring new skills. They are challenging some long-held assumptions about what and why you buy IT.
First in AI, I believe that enterprises will see substantial ROI from their AI investment, meaning that it’s easy to justify both time and money investments. However, IT leaders can waste a lot of both by doing the wrong things. To save time, it’s critical to get good advice and follow reference architectures. We are seeing people waste A LOT of time and effort building bespoke management tooling for AI clusters.
The same risk is true for VMware replacement. IT leaders may want to reconsider replacing VMware with another virtualization platform (aka revirtualization), but, at RackN, we believe that bare metal Kubernetes is the more natural migration path because it simplifies platforms and enables improved AI integration. Even with the price hikes, most enterprises are finding that VMware alternatives are a difficult lift for marginal gain. The more resilient path is to eliminate virtualization as a requirement. This also opens up the opportunity to re-evaluate the mix of GPU, RAM, CPU and SSDs that are best fit and save a lot of capital.
The common thread here is that enterprise IT needs to get smart about bare metal physical infrastructure really quickly. Companies that can navigate these changes will be well positioned for success, bare metal automation expertise, like that found in RackN engineers, remains hard to come by, and that I don’t expect to change anytime soon.
##
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rob Hirschfeld, RackN CEO & Co-Founder
Rob has been creating software to automate production infrastructure for 25 years. During that time, he designed and operated both virtualized clouds and physical layers. He co-founded RackN with a mission to make data center operations consistent, flexible and easier. Today, their product, Digital Rebar, leads the industry in vendor-agnostic scaling of bare metal IaC automation and provisioning for enterprise and edge data centers.
