Tech Infrastructure Will See Significant Disruption In 2025

In 2025, we expect the normally slow-moving technology infrastructure space to see significant disruption, with changes driven by accelerated appetite for all things AI. Firms have sky-high expectations from AI, encouraging their investments to explore its potential in pilots and experimentation. We believe that 2025 is the year when businesses start to demonstrate real return on investment and concrete value to justify the hype and expense of their AI initiatives. In addition, the devastating CrowdStrike outage in 2024 highlighted the importance of addressing risk, resiliency, and modern security practices. Tech infrastructure and ops professionals must be ready to respond to all of these trends.

Here are three of predictions for technology infrastructure and operations in 2025:

A major high-tech vendor will scale back its AI infrastructure investment by 25%.

Driven by supply shortages, unmet expectations, and investor pressure, a major tech vendor will reign in AI infrastructure investment in 2025. Demand for AI chips and servers — fueled by generative AI — has outpaced vendors’ ability to deliver. In addition, despite billions of dollars invested in AI infrastructure and generative AI in 2023, only 20% of businesses reported earnings benefits from AI in 2024. The gap between AI infrastructure investment and tepid returns will lead to a major tech vendor such as Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, or IBM reducing their AI infrastructure investments by 25% in 2025. This will embolden others to reduce their investments, and that will cascade through the market. Tech leaders should expect this to place further strain on the availability of AI services and infrastructure in 2025.

VMware customers will shrink 40% of their VMware deployments in favor of the cloud.

In 2025, VMware’s largest 2,000 customers will shrink their deployment size by an average of 40%. This reduction will be driven by increased migration to the public cloud, on-premises alternatives, and new architecture. Despite firms’ interests in private cloud due to digital sovereignty and cost concerns, VMware continues to face challenges. Broadcom’s price increases and cost-cutting measures are expected to boost its net profits, as there are not many credible competitors capable of helping clients replace VMware virtualization. Tech leaders should follow our advice on dealing with alternatives to VMware and consider how they manage their VMware investments and any alternatives.

Self-service will overtake humans as the preferred first-contact channel for service desks.

Positive sentiment around the self-service help desk is growing thanks to product improvements and increased comfort working alongside AI systems like ChatGPT. Forrester predicts that in 2025, 50% of businesses will enable the self-service help desk as the first-contact touchpoint. Improvements, such as digital employee experience-driven automated endpoint troubleshooting and enterprise service management formalizing workflows, are expanding what self-service can do. When combined with large language models, self-service can now handle complex tasks like device troubleshooting.