What Nutanix’s latest Enterprise Cloud Index tells MSPs about shadow AI, sovereignty, and the inf... скачать в хорошем качестве

What Nutanix’s latest Enterprise Cloud Index tells MSPs about shadow AI, sovereignty, and the inf...

Lee Caswell, senior vice president of product and solutions marketing at Nutanix Nutanix has published the 8th annual Enterprise Cloud Index (https://www.nutanix.com/enterprise-cl...) , its flagship survey tracking how organizations are building and managing infrastructure. This year’s findings hit three themes that matter for the channel: the rapid spread of unmanaged AI tools, the growing weight of data sovereignty, and the accelerating shift toward containers. Lee Caswell (  / leecaswell  ) , Nutanix’s senior vice president of product and solutions marketing, joins us to dig into the data. Lee spent years at VMware before joining Nutanix, giving him an unusual perspective on how the infrastructure market is reshaping itself – particularly as organizations navigate Broadcom’s changes to VMware (https://www.crn.com/news/virtualizati...) alongside the push to build AI-ready environments. The numbers are striking: 79 per cent of respondents encounter AI tools deployed outside IT’s oversight, 80 per cent consider data sovereignty a top infrastructure priority, and 87 per cent expect containerization to increase. But Lee’s read goes beyond the headlines. On shadow AI, he argues most of this is rational behaviour by teams testing in the cloud before committing on-prem – the real challenge is providing a structured path, not clamping down. On sovereignty, he draws a memorable distinction between a “noisy neighbor” and a “nosy neighbor” in multi-tenant environments – a framing that matters for how MSPs position managed services around compliance. Lee, who recently wrote about what he calls the “sovereign edge” (https://www.nutanix.com/blog/the-evol...) , goes deep on what sovereignty means in practice when AI workloads need to stay local. The conversation also explores the MSP opportunity. While 65 per cent of respondents say their AI runs via managed service providers, Lee candidly notes that figure includes SaaS-delivered AI. The bigger play, he argues, is MSPs becoming the “governed alternative” to shadow AI – a sanctioned service layer offering sovereignty compliance, optimal application placement, and predictable costs. His closing advice: be “AI smart,” not just “AI fast.” Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to Canadian IT solution providers for 16 years now. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and as always your host for the show. If you’re an MSP, there’s a good chance your customers are already using AI tools that your team doesn’t know about. Nutanix recently released the 8th annual Enterprise Cloud Index, their big annual survey of how organizations are building and managing infrastructure. And this year, the data paints a picture that would be uncomfortable for anyone who thinks they’ve got a handle on where AI is running in their environment. Nearly 80% of respondents say they’ve encountered AI tools or agents deployed outside IT’s control. Data sovereignty has become a top priority, and containers are quietly becoming the default for new applications. My guest today is Lee Caswell, Nutanix’s senior vice president of product and solutions marketing. Lee came to Nutanix from VMware, so he’s been watching the infrastructure market reshape itself from a vantage point that very few people have. We dig into what the survey data actually says, where the contradictions are, and what it means for MSPs and solution providers. Here’s our conversation. Robert Dutt: Lee, thanks for taking the time. Lee Caswell: Well, Robert, thank you. Robert Dutt: You come to Nutanix from VMware, and your CEO now, Rajiv Ramaswami, he was the COO over there. Now you’re running this survey while the virtualization market is being reshaped by Broadcom’s changes. How does sitting where you sit now, having been kind of on both sides of that fence, shape how you look at this year’s data? Lee Caswell: Well, I think it’s fascinating that for years, maybe 20 years, people just assumed that the underlying virtualization layer was fixed. That vSphere was well established, super product, exciting. A lot of people built their careers, frankly, on learning the ins and outs of vSphere. And to a lesser extent, some of the later add-on products. But the idea that the underlying virtualization layer has changed has, for the first time in years, had people reconsidering how they will build out their IT infrastructure for the next 10 years. Robert Dutt: And we’ll circle back to that theme and that infrastructure theme a little later. But I wanted to dive in off the top into shadow AI, because it’s something that we’ve been talking about a fair bit on the podcast, and it’s something that a lot of partners are thinking about and trying to get their heads around how to deal with it. Accordi...