Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026. Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By George Crump, Verge.io
Every year, the industry produces a wave of “predictions” about what the next year will bring. These are not predictions. They are aspirations framed to align with what vendors want customers to buy next. When those outcomes fail to materialize, the explanation is usually framed as poor execution rather than unrealistic assumptions.
This article focuses on what will not happen in 2026, despite widespread hype. In every case, the limiting factor is the same. Enterprise infrastructure remains fragmented, built from components supplied by different vendors, each with its own operational model. That fragmentation slows change, increases risk, and makes broad transformation far harder than marketing narratives suggest.
2026 Will Not Be the Year of Cloud Repatriation
Cloud repatriation activity will occur in 2026, but there will not be a mass movement of workloads back on-premises.
Organizations want to repatriate workloads to regain control of costs and operational predictability. The problem is not motivation. Moving workloads back means re-entering a fragmented environment where storage, networking, and virtualization are managed independently. Public cloud platforms hide that complexity behind abstraction layers. On-prem environments expose it directly.
In 2026, organizations will spend time evaluating options and closing functional gaps rather than executing large-scale moves. Selective repatriation will occur, but enterprises will avoid dramatic shifts. Cloud repatriation will lag behind the pace of VMware exits because VMware replacement addresses fragmentation at the core of the stack.
2026 Will Not Be the Year of Enterprise AI
Enterprise AI adoption will grow in 2026, but it will not become a consistent, organization-wide capability.
AI efforts today are isolated projects driven by individual teams. Each project independently solves for data placement, GPU access, storage performance, networking, and lifecycle management. Fragmented infrastructure forces those decisions to be reinvented repeatedly, with different assumptions and constraints each time.
This leads to experimentation without standardization. AI systems cannot scale across an organization when every deployment depends on a different combination of vendors and operational practices. Skills shortages amplify the problem, but infrastructure inconsistency is the underlying cause. Production deployments will appear in 2026, but broad enterprise AI usage remains years away.
2026 Will Not Be the Year of Storage Refreshes
Storage refresh cycles will slow in 2026, particularly when tied to server upgrades.
Rising SSD and memory pricing places immediate pressure on capital budgets. The deeper issue is architectural. Storage platforms rely heavily on DRAM to deliver baseline capabilities such as metadata management, fault tolerance, and data services. As memory prices rise, those designs become harder to justify. Fragmented environments compound the problem because each storage system carries its own memory overhead, tuning requirements, and operational footprint.
Storage refreshes will still occur, but delays are likely because of cost. The exception occurs when organizations align storage refreshes with VMware exits and broader infrastructure modernization. In those cases, storage can be replaced with platforms that reduce memory dependency and operational overhead. In 2026, extending server longevity and using those servers for your storage refresh will be critical to surviving the upcoming price increases.
2026 Will Not Be the Year of Infrastructure Automation
Automation adoption will increase in 2026, but infrastructure-wide, durable automation will remain uncommon.
Vendors now expose APIs and support tools such as Packer, Terraform, Ansible, and Prometheus. Thanks to AI, writing automation scripts is no longer the primary challenge. Maintaining them is.
Fragmented infrastructure forces automation code to account for endless combinations of compute, storage, and networking components. Each architectural change introduces new conditions. Old and new platforms coexist, expanding code paths and increasing the risk of failure. As long as infrastructure is assembled from disparate components rather than designed as a cohesive system, automation remains brittle. Teams will automate individual tasks rather than entire systems, limiting the long-term impact.
What Will Continue in 2026: The VMware Exit
One thing will continue without interruption in 2026. The VMware exit will accelerate.
More renewals come due than in prior years. Organizations responded to the Broadcom acquisition with short-term renewals to buy time. That time has expired. VMware’s move to three- and five-year renewal terms removes the ability to delay decisions again. Organizations now face a structural choice. Continue operating a fragmented stack anchored to legacy virtualization, or move to a platform that reduces complexity across the environment. Taking the hypervisor swap approach is, at best, a step sideways, and at worst, it is a step backwards.
Conclusion
Treating the VMware exit as an infrastructure decision rather than a hypervisor swap creates a different outcome. It reduces fragmentation, lowers operational overhead, and allows hardware to change gradually without forcing every dependent system to change with it. Looking for an Infrastructure Operating System to replace VMware opens the door to projects like cloud repatriation, enterprise AI, and automation.
##
